Dynamic Variation in your voiceover reads - VO LIFE Episode 6

Toby Ricketts Presents another voiceover technique tip! This week it is dynamic variation - the difference between the quiet and loud parts of your speech, and the intensity and emotion of the delivery. Toby demonstrates a 0 - 5 scale to help illustrate what is meant by dynamic variation and how to get more control of it in your reads. For pro voiceovers and newbies alike, Gravy for the Brain Oceania has courses, live webinars, live script read throughs, tools, forums and so much more all included in your monthly membership, with no minimum time and no joining or leaving fees.
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Transcript:

Hello and welcome to another edition of vo life with me Toby Ricketts coming to you live from my Northland studio here in New Zealand. This episode is brought to you in association with gravy for the brain, Oceania. Whether you're a pro, or you're just starting out in the field gravy for the brain can help you keep your edge if you're Pro, or get to the next level if you're just learning. So you can find out more in the description below. Today, I want to cover dynamic variation within your reads. What do I mean by dynamic variation? I mean, how much difference there is between the bottom and top of your read. So if I was to speak with no dynamic variation, I'd be speaking in a monotone like this with no emotion and nothing sort of to indicate the highs and lows. Okay? Whereas if I'm voicing like a radio commercial, which has lots of dynamic variation, I'd be speaking like this, and sometimes you come across people who talk like this every day, it must get very exhausting. And so that's the end of the scale. I want you to imagine like pilots have they have that big lever which throttles up the engines and down Okay, probably with like, I don't know, 10 or probably infinite different levels. But let's imagine a scale of five different levels. How do we do this with voice? Well, let's start with a completely flat, emotionless delivery. I'm gonna put the script just down here on the screen. It's a very simple script that I just wrote. very generic, so it doesn't have anything to sort of color it. Okay. So let's go zero on our voice scale. This is what I call the kind of ponderous, dispassionate read, okay. Discover the benefits of our products today. Click here to find a store near you. So it's just it's not giving anything away. Perfume commercials. Car commercials often use this read when it's kind of abstract, and you're kind of looking for meaning in something. Here's to the ones who dare to live to enjoy to the fullest. So let's dial that up to like Say two out of five, okay? Discover the benefits of our products today. Click here to find a store near you. And I put that in the category of conversational, because when you're having a conversation with someone, you're not trying to sell them anything, but you're not completely uninterested in what they're saying. So there's this kind of, there's a bit of things going there, but not much. Everything in our world is interconnected. How you do business affect someone else who affects another. And so let's take it up to level three just a bit higher than conversational. Discover the benefits of our products today. Click here to find a store near you. It's like a helpful neighbor or maybe like a good salesperson, okay, Hello, we're square. We're here to help you accept all major cards and get paid fast. Right? Brilliant. Cheerio. If we take it to, let's say number five. So this is where we're really basically Trying to get people's attention. It's kind of old school advertising, because it's a bit inauthentic. Really, these days, advertising is working to the fact that if it sounds like you're trying to sell something, then we probably don't want to buy it. So this is what that read would sound like. Discover the benefits of our products today. Click here to find a store near you. Mentos pure fresh chewing gum with green tea extract gives you the freshness to connect. It's kind of an arms race in advertising because that if every ad is like that, then if any ads not like that, it's going to stick out but since everyone the arms race has kind of come back down. Now that more sort of around two or three levels is appropriate. So that's today's lesson that's about the dynamic variation in your reads whether it's super excited, or whether it's completely flat. It's really good to be able to nail both ends of that spectrum, but then know exactly where you are. So if someone can say ah can you add a bit more energy to it but more light and shade you know how far they go or to take that away on the other end of the spectrum. That's all we have time for on vo life today. Remember - Gravy for the Brain Oceania - do check it out. The link is down at the bottom and I'll catch you very soon we'll have more of these updates and hopefully get more voice over knowledge out to you. Let me know if you're enjoying these Toby@toby Ricketts dot com or follow me on one of these various social platforms.

#VOLIFE - Episode 4 - Find your Greatness

On todays #volife videoblog Toby takes a look at one of the most popular ad examples given by producers when showing what kind of read they would like when recording their own voiceover.

It's Tom Hardy's voice featured in the Nike - Find Your Greatness spot, and what a great read it is.

Toby explores this style of read and what makes it so compelling in today's voice over zeitgeist! He also discusses various elements of voice over delivery including pace, prosidy and style, as well as understanding the copy and making it relatable.

Find more episodes of VOLIFE on my Youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/tobyricketts

#volife #voiceover #TomHardy

"Greatness. It's just something we made up. Somehow we've come to believe that greatness is a gift reserved for a chosen few, for prodigies, for superstars, and the rest of us can only stand by watching. You can forget that. Greatness is not some rare DNA strand, not some precious thing. Greatness is no more unique to us than breathing. We're all capable of it. All of us."