there’s one skill I’ve found working with voiceover talent that can speed up their jobs and auditions and make them much more efficient in voiceovers now this may be a bit controversial and it may hurt some people’s feelings but I’m gonna give it to you straight to succeeded voice overs you need to be able to read hello I’m William Williams from Aliso creeks voiceover classes whenever I talked to a new voice-over talent they tell me two things I can read and I can talk so I got this and the first thing we find out is they can’t read okay I don’t mean they can’t read of course they can read but what I do mean is they can’t get through 30 seconds of copy without missing a word or hesitating some of these talents say they want to do audiobooks trust me if you can’t get through 30 seconds of voiceover copy you’re gonna have a great deal of difficulty reading an entire book the subject of reading is the third rail in the world of Education it’s distinctly possible for a student to get all the way through high school and not be able to read in a continuous flowing way and understand what they’re reading but I’m not gonna go there that’s for the world of Education to sort out I’m just giving you my practical experience from directing and coaching Talent for over 20 years first of all let me point out that reading and talking are not the same thing when you’re talking you get to make up all the words and you put your own inflection into each word to get the meaning across and since you’re making up the words you’re phrasing automatically fits your breathing so if you start to run out of air you can cut the sentence short and breathe also the words automatically flow from your ideas we don’t say anything to anyone unless there’s some motivation behind that speech some reason to say something so that’s natural speech when you’re reading for example a narration paragraph or a commercial copy these are not your ideas it’s not the vocabulary that you would choose and it may not be the phrasing that you would use so adjusting your speech skills to written copy it’s actually a very tricky process in another video I talked about your speech nonverbal toolkit these are the nonverbal things you do when you speak such as talking louder or softer raising or lowering the pitch of your voice putting certain emotions in your read and so forth when you’re reading someone else’s writing your mind has to calculate how to include all these variations of your voice you also have to figure out where you’re going to breathe actually what you’re doing is taking speech that has been condensed down to a piece of paper and Riaan flayman communication and that can be tricky here’s the second challenge actually our eyes were not made to read our eyes were made to scan the savannahs of Africa for any movements that may help or hinder us so in life our eyes don’t move in a linear direction they bounce around looking for things that are changing so if you’re on a grassy plane in Africa and that grass over there starts to move that usually means there’s something there that you can eat or something there that might eat you think about driving down the highway if all the cars are going exactly the same speed in their lanes it’s almost like they disappear then one of the cars decides to get off the highway and you notice their blinker and the fact that the car is changing lanes so that’s how our eyes work in the real world okay back to reading now in reading you’re asking for my eyes to move from left to right until the end of the line and then back to the left again and to the right again for the new line so reading asks your eyes to follow a very linear path that is not natural there are also different types of reading sometimes we read for form and sometimes we read for content when you first learn to read you strictly read for form C spa run run spot run but very quickly in your education you begin reading for content if you’re reading them out in the polian at the Battle of Waterloo you really don’t care exactly what the words are you just want to find out what happened on that fateful day most of the reading we do in our daily lives involves reading for content if you read a magazine you’re reading it for the information not the way the words and sentences are formed but if you’re reading commercial copy you need to read all the words exactly as they’re written you can’t just vaguely get the idea what the sentences are saying and make up your own words to describe it you have to read the words verbatim which is a skill you haven’t practiced in years oh and finally most of the time we read to ourselves and we read to ourselves two or three times faster than when we read out loud maybe this is happening to you you’ll be reading through some copy and then suddenly you realize that what your mouth is saying and what your eyes are reading are not in sync your eyes have moved forward and are three or four lines down the paragraph and your mouth is still along the first line you can tell this is happening if you get lost in the copy or if you insert words into the sentence that are in fact on the next line or several lines down okay now we’ve defined some of the reading problems here are some solutions first you have to get your eyes and your mouth to synchronize remember in the second grade when your teacher said don’t follow along with your finger and don’t move your lips when you read well here’s what I want you to do I want you to follow along with your finger and move your lips when you read by tracking along with what you’re reading with your finger you force your eyes to slow down and stay in the moment with a copy as you’re reading by the way don’t actually touch the paper or screen because the mic might pick up that tiny noise another technique that can help is to use some kind of straightedge like a ruler and only try to read one line of copy at a time this prevents your eyes from bouncing forward and picking up stray words farther down in the copy which happens quite frequently I have another rule I use with my students and I think it’s very important and that is when you’re reading copy and you make a mistake don’t go back and correct your mistake I have found that if when you stumble you stop and go back and fix those words that in fact you’re giving yourself permission to fail and by the way you’re also reversing the direction your eyes are going in so your eyes will tend to bounce around once again so if you make a mistake ignore it and keep reading trust me your mind already knows you made the mistake and the next time you read the copy it will correct the mistake you want to push yourself farther and farther through the copy to the point where you can read 30 or 60 seconds or more without a mistake but this requires practice to develop the skill don’t practice failing practice succeeding if you can get to the point where you can read a 30 second audition without hesitating or stumbling then guess what it will only take you 30 seconds to do a 30 second audition auditioning is competitive and you often need to do many auditions to get a job improving your reading skills and accuracy will make performing auditions and jobs much more efficient if you liked this video please subscribe to my channel and hit the like button and hit the bell to be notified when new videos come out and for more information on all things voiceover visit Aliso Creek dotnet I’m William Williams reminding you keep talking [Music] you [Music] you
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