Narrating on audiobook and voiceover
Hello, everyone, welcome to Top Pros; the premier podcast of the voice winning community. I am today’s host [Inaudible00:00:10], and with us is Scott Ellis. He has a background in theater and education and has over 30 years of teaching and library experience. As one of our voice talents, he has recorded over 25 audiobooks and has completed 400 deliverables in the past year. It’s a pleasure to have you here. Welcome to the program, Scott.
Thank you very much. I’m honored to be selected and proud to be able to help.
Excellent, excellent thanks. Wonderful. So now, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us a little bit about your background, and then we go into the real questions.
Sure. You covered a lot of it in your intro. I a little update. I just retired from teaching after 30 years. So yesterday, as of the recording of this was my first day with no students in over 30 years. [Both laughing]
I got into this actually, because of my students. When I ended my career, I spent the last couple of years working in an elementary school library. And the kids would say to me, “Gee, Mr. Ellis, you should be a professional reader.” And I said,” You know, I pretty much get paid to read to you guys, that makes me a professional reader.” And it got me thinking about how I would go ahead and do audiobooks and voiceover narration, and it got so busy so quickly that I was able to retire and did to go into this full time.
Excellent. That’s a great bit of background information. I love it. Today’s topic is basically going to be about performance. Okay, so we’re going explore a couple of questions that deal with a delivery and the performance of a voiceover. Alright, let’s get started. Scott, first question, what is a must for you when it comes to performing a voiceover?
I think a must for me is that I have to fit what the client is looking for. I know what I can do, and I know what I can’t, and I don’t want to try and stretch myself and do something that I know, the client wouldn’t appreciate. It says in there that they need the voice of God or that movie announcer voice which you can probably tell I don’t have. [laughs] Also I think a must for me is being able to fit so that I know that the client will be happy, maybe come back to me in the future. I know that it’s something that I’m going to be able to do within the timeframe and not have it be too stressful because I’m trying to fit myself somewhere that I don’t belong. So, I think that would be probably the first must for me,
I think a must for me is that I have to fit what the client is looking for. I know what I can do, and I know what I can’t, and I don’t want to try and stretch myself and do something that I know the client wouldn’t appreciate. It says in there that they need the voice of God or that movie announcer voice, which you can probably tell I don’t have. [laughs] Also, I think a must for me is being able to fit so that I know that the client will be happy, maybe come back to me in the future. I know that it’s something that I’m going to be able to do within the timeframe and not have it be too stressful because I’m trying to fit myself somewhere that I don’t belong. So, I think that would be probably the first must for me,
Sometimes I guess I don’t know what the great performance is until new voice bunny job comes up, and I look at some of the other work that they’ve recently approved. And I always listened to all of those just to get an idea of what they want. I’m thrilled when I hear one that I’ve done, I say, “Hey, that’s me.” or on the weekly this week in voice bunny when I look at that list, and I see that a job of mine has been selected. So that’s how…
It’s the external knowing and from the internal, it’s just when I know that I’ve done my best when I listen back to it, and I say, “Yes, I’m going to send that like it is there’s nothing that I need to change or edit and off it can go.”
Wonderful. How do you choose what voice tone to use in each case? Particular, for example, take on audiobook.
How do you modulate the voice of the narrator? How is narrating on audiobook different to narrating a voiceover?
That’s a great question. They are significantly different. The voices when I’m working with an author, first thing that I do is I read the book with a notebook at my elbow, and I jot down all of the characters as they appear. I put all of those little anecdotal things that the author’s so good at just sneaking in, that gives you an idea of what that character might sound like what they might look like.
I’ll ask authors for their packages, who is this character? How tall is he? How much does he weigh? Where did he grow up? Where was he born? It gives you all of that background information. Then I think as my acting background kicking in, I can kind of create a lot of different voices. I’ll send the author some samples and say, “You know, Frank could sound like this, this or this, what do you think?” They’ll usually pick one that they like, and we can move from there. I keep anchor files of all of my voices for that book so that if a character shows up 70 pages or two books later if it’s a series, I can go back and make sure that they sound exactly the same as they did the first time to listen or heard them.