Most of my voice over work consists of video narrations for corporate projects but from time to time I get asked to provide voiceovers for commercials.  Talking to some other voice over artists it seems that this scenario is quite common: you’re in the booth doing a session, you’ve done a couple of takes, everyone in the control room quite likes what you’re doing but they just wonder if you can give it “a bit more excitement, a bit more energy”.

It is often quite hard to know exactly what that means but generally I guess most of us will increase the volume and perhaps try to make the sound of the voice more animated, hopefully, you think, more excited sounding.  In reality often what happens is that you end up backing off the mic a little and just shouting!

So I was interested in this video that suggests another way to finding the extra “energy”.  I’ve mentioned Nancy Wolfson before – she is a voice artist and voice coach with loads of videos on-line.  She’s American and although the US market differs from the UK one in lots of ways she still has loads of relevant things to say to anyone who does voice over work.

In this video she’s explaining how to approach those daunting VO jobs where you get to voice the tag for an ad – sometimes no more than a couple of words.  Around about 2’05” in the video she says “I’m a big fan of less volume” and goes on to demonstrate with the guy she’s working with how you can inject more urgency and energy into the lines but without getting louder.  To be fair she’s describing how to make a VO work on a TV ad where you are supporting the pictures – but I like her idea and I’m going to experiment with what she calls “less volume with an urgent amount of emotional energy”.

See Nancy in action here:

One down side I can see is that the client may actually prefer you to be shouting in that big cheesy “Come on down!” style – in which case that’s just what you’ll have to do.
In my relatively limited experience of commercials this seems to apply especially, but not exclusively, to radio ads in the UAE: clients there do seem especially fond of that style of delivery!