I had a booking today for a voice-over assignment. It was a narration for a podcast to accompany video footage of a recent conference. It all seemed pretty straight-forward, and indeed, it was. Plain prose to accompany the images.
I did a sample read of the first paragraph or so. The producer telephoned the client – on the other side of the country – and she listened to my ‘read.’ She was generally complimentary, but wanted less ‘up and down’ in the voice on one particular sentence. I listened back and heard what she found problematical. It wasn’t wrong per se, just distracting, drawing attention to itself and not to the visuals accompanying it.
Well, the rules of the game say that the client is always right, and I think she made the right call. I ‘flattened’ out the ‘ups and downs’ and gave her a different sound. It was a salutary reminder that there are no hard and fast rules, just the right feel for a particular presentation. It’s finding the feel that is the challenge.
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