How Bad Scripts Kill Voice Over Performances
It's easy to listen to a voice over that you don't like and blame the voice actor.
After all, they're the ones saying the words.
But this is often like shooting the messenger, rather than looking at the content.
In my experience voicing different projects from brand videos to advertising campaigns for large brands, you can really cripple a voice actor by giving them a badly written or unsuitable script.
So let's look at three problems I've seen, and how I would solve them.
Text that was not written to be spoken.
The fix is very simple: read it out loud. Do you find yourself breathing mid-sentence because there are no places to naturally pause? Does it read like dialogue or an academic paper?
More experienced voice actors can kind of work around this if it's not perfect. I, for example will find implied pauses and interpret the punctuation in what sounds most natural to me, but there is a limit. Write it like it's meant to be spoken.
Too many words in not enough time.
This happens all the time. Every bit of information is important, so it's presented in as much detail as possible.
The solution is pretty simple. Think twice about how precious certain details are, and cut what isn't essential. If you include too much information listeners will forget.
I actually did this in a live directed session not too long ago. We were trying to fit a sentence in time it didn't really have, so I suggested removing a word that didn't affect the meaning of the message. We did, and it helped!
I've definitely repeated this but awful translations.
I live in Italy so I have received lots of text which started in Italian. A lot of the work is sloppy, the word order is wrong and I'm the first person to realise it because the English was checked by an Italian.
I know people want to blame AI for bad translations but honestly this is a human problem. The real issue is people just don't know. Budget is a factor, but it's not the reason because I've seen the Italian versions of advertising campaigns that started as English ones, and the translation is just word for word. It's terrible.
The best solution to this is rewriting. Localization. Translation is almost never a perfect solution because every languages has it's own unique characteristic which can't really be translated.
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