Week 4 Update

This past week I was incredibly busy. I had a lot of projects and tests in other classes, so I was not able to devote the usual amount of time to my videos. I kind of feel like I dropped the ball this past week but I have a lot more time to make up for it this week.

Progress:
I finished the first draft of my script and I am working on final edits before I record my voice track. I have decided to do all of my work in Adobe elements and Adobe Audition because both programs are readily available on campus and will not give me any compatibility issues. The only problem I can foresee is that Elements and Audition are not on the computers in Phillips, so I will be doing all of my work in Hibbard or the 24 hour lab. I live in Hibbard most of the week anyway, so it's less of a problem for me and more of a problem if I want anyone in class to see my progress on my video and audio.

Challenges: Another thing that I have been thinking about is my reading style for my voice track. I really took my reading style for granted and I recently discovered that I only know how to do one style of reading well. I did some vocal test reads and my usual authoritative news reporter voice and it was just not engaging in relation to my subject matter. The videos I am making are going to be longer that a traditional news package and authoritative news reporter voice just gets really tiresome after several minutes.

I tried to read in a more friendly, active and "actorish" style of voice and I struggled so much. My inflections are off and you can hear how hard I am trying by the strain and tension in my voice. The recordings I made of those attempts are embarrassing.

In an effort to improve my reading voice for these mini documentaries I turned to YouTube. I found some examples of women voice actors doing VOs for documentaries.

 

 

 

Both of these videos show very engaging styles of voice overs. The top video has a more educational tone, but the bottom one is a more dramatic reading that really only works because the video is reenacted dramatizations. My VO style for these videos will probably lie somewhere between these two styles because the subject matter is educational and also from a dramatic part of history.  I have also been watching a lot of VO tip videos from working voice actors, the only drawback to those is that they are usually giving tips for commercial work and not for documentary style work.

This process has forced me to work on a personal quality that I kind of never thought about before. I am naturally not an animated person. I am definitely deadpan and sarcastic and straightforward with my communication style. Now that I am voicing these videos I'm really going to have to retrain my communication style and learn some new "actorish" behaviors that I was a little disdainful of in the past.