Direction needed for radio ad

I recently completed two voiceover jobs within a day of each other that were so contrastingly different they seemed to sum up the range of work I often seem to get.

Firstly I recorded the voiceover for a health and safety training video for external contractors working in factories supplying Asda. The script was quite long – several thousand words and running to several pages of script.  Just as I finished editing that voiceover another job came in this time for a radio ad.
The health and safety narration script ran to thousands words but this second job was barely more than 5 words!  Even for a radio ad this was a short script.

The scenario was two guys talking about a great new mobile phone deal from Du.  In the dialogue one man is holding forth with the details on the deal while the other is struggling to get a word in edgeways.

I was MVO2 and my part in the dialogue consisted of the following:  “What?”, “If…”, “But..”,”I…” and “Er…”
Apart from an initial run through with the other already recorded voiceover for reference all the other takes were in isolation. It was quite hard to give each of these solitary syllables the correct inflection and emotion to help tell the story. But at least I had a bit of an idea of what was happening to go on: at least I’d heard the other guy’s voice part.  Fortunately there were also some directorial suggestions from the client (“Can you sound more surprised?”) and after we did 3 or 4 takes the client was happy.

In a similar vein there’s a video clip I like that radio guru Dan O’Day posted on his blog site.  It shows American voice trainer Nancy Wolfson demonstrating the difficulties of delivering a VO for a script with only 3 syllables – in this case a tag for a TV ad – when there’s no direction on offer.

I like this clip because a) it shows a difficulty voiceovers frequently encounter (ie not having much in the script to go on and often no real direction from the client) and b) I love Nancy Wolfson’s stance – she stands like she’s fronting a rock band – she looks like she needs needs wedge monitors on the stage to put her foot on.

She’s pretty cool I think. Voiceover work boring?  Not according to Nancy – she definitely rocks!

The video for IPL Asda is produced by Bretby Media.
The radio ad for Du is produced by BKP (UAE)