focus Archives - Rebecca Haugh

Storytelling – Three, Two, One

business, creative professionals, small business, VO tech, voiceover

Storytelling is a vital…

You probably already knew that storytelling is vital in your creative projects, for sure.

I still voice a lot of scripts that don’t do storytelling. I assume that’s because clients don’t believe it’s worth the effort? You tell me.

A vital piece of your creative content.

With a riveting story, you can lead your audience anywhere, and they’ll follow.

Here are some simple ways to see your content with stories:

Character Appeal

Get your audience on your characters’ side–whether it be a fictional person or a real life customer–and make sure their goals are clear and bold. They need to be appealing enough for audiences to root for them to achieve their goals.

Obstacle Tension

The obstacles in your characters’ paths inform the stakes and tension of the story. The quality of the challenges will dictate how much audiences are engaged in your characters because they get to show how resourceful and layered they are.

Bold Conclusion

Start strong, and end even stronger to leave a lasting impression. Even if the ending’s a foregone conclusion you can still make it affecting, moving, and even surprising with a captivating finale.

Let me know if you have any comments, as I’m always happy to hear from you.

Pro Voiceover: ROI in eLearning Courses

business, creative professionals, instructional design, small business, VO tech, voiceover

What Is ROI?

ROI is an acronym for ‘return on investment’. For example, hiring instructional designers is investing money into a business endeavor, an e-learning course. Calculating ROI helps everyone understand the value your course creates. Within e-Learning courses, are you asking about ROI for hiring a professional voice actor?

Let’s put this in the hands of the experts – the Instructional Designer. You are ready to develop your virtual reality, game-based, micro-learning or video-based eLearning course. You’re drafting design elements, and pondering…

Will you hire professional voice talent (VO)?

Using a pro voice actor has positive effects for your learners within an excellent instructional design. VOs work as hired actors, narrators, and characters of varying ages in mock scenarios.

But what’s your ROI with hiring a pro VO? Are these challenging questions popping up:

The budget is set… So leave out the VO and save on that budget line item?
Some colleagues pull aside an in-house person to save funds.
Others say it adds time to hire a professional VO.

What’s your ROI if you do or don’t hire a VO? Are there hidden costs? Apply top-level considerations to your unique project.

Pros and Cons of In-house Recordings

Is your project a short course with limited audience, limited use, and the audio recording quality is not an issue? Then it probably makes sense to keep it in-house. Whoever does the in-house recordings will do their best with the experience, time and focus they can offer.

On the flip side, there are a few typical issues that can cost more time or produce sub-standard audio quality:

Usually non-pros require more recording time, and fixing errors time, compared to pros. The average unskilled person needs about 4-5 hours of work to create 1 finished hour of audio. A pro can get it done in 2-3 hours.
Will they edit for you, or is that your chore? More demands on your time?
Using in-house doesn’t mean ‘free’. Their regular work is being delayed. Whose budget does that hit?
Audio can be distorted with office background noise, or from non-professional equipment, or both. Will you receive clean undistorted audio?
Vocal expression may not fit the course. For example, monotonous tone, or inability to engage the text vocally, or not sounding authentic or conversational. Will the spoken word recording be vibrant and appropriate?

Audio should enhance the instructional experience. The spoken word recordings should enhance the script you’ve developed. Audio should never detract from the course nor distract the participant. Still, a non-pro may be your only option. For some projects, if you can live with these results, then stick with in-house audio.

Professional Voice Talent Recordings

Is your course for a larger audience, with broader use, and high audio quality a requirement? You probably already know it’s time to consider using professional voice talent. A course like this is representing the brand of the company it’s created for.

Here are typical benefits of hiring a pro voice talent:

Spoken Word Experience
A professional voice talent offers many years of experience with all different types of e-learning projects. She understands what you expect.

Audio Expertise
Professional voice talent have pro studio equipment and deliver high-quality audio recordings of your script. She stays up with trends in her industry, from varying styles of vocal performance, to the latest technologies for recording. If you need audio edits after the initial recordings, your VO talent should provide new audio that seamlessly blends into the project.

Trained Actor
Pro VOs are experts delivering a performance in front of a microphone (as compared to on stage or in front of a camera), and speaking to the intended audience when recording, to generate and maintain audience interest. Additionally, gaming and scenario-based courses often incorporate re-enactments or dramatizations that require acting skills.

Professional Commitment
Pro VOs are a business people that will aim to quickly turn around your projects and readily accommodate your deadlines.

Your Brand
Consider the impact that a professional production will have on your brand identity. It’s a business investment signaling to participants of the course that you value quality. Professional audio can convey a brand’s message in mere seconds.

What’s the ROI?

The most common ROI formula is net return divided by the total cost.

The simplest way to think about the ROI formula is to add up the value of benefits (return) and dividing it by the cost.

If you say something has a good or bad ROI, then explain how you measure it. Each ROI case will be specific to the course you’re creating.

In conclusion, the choice of VO for e-learning projects is one of many crucial elements within the design process. The ROI will depend your budget, your experience with either in-house or pro VOs, and what the overall experience should be for your course participants.

Let me know if you think I’ve missed anything, as I’m always happy to hear from you.

Staying Focused

accountability, business, small business, voiceover

I had SUCH a problem with ‘holding focus’ recently, like others have.

December 2020 was a quiet close to a year that had a lot of big ups and downs. Christmas and New Years provided some relief and relaxation. In fact, memes around New Years were funny, particularly this one, which made me literally laugh out loud:

Meme: Just wait til 2020 turns 21 and starts drinking — Just wait til 2020 turns 21 and starts drinking

Then January 6th, 2021 happened. U.S. news of politics and culture had me “attention-captured”. It’s like that saying about driving by an accident on the road. You can’t help but stare. And this was one big, long accident. News and reaction was everywhere, from email inbox to social media to podcasts to online streaming. How could I not be concerned and affected by all the news about the US election, the Capitol riot and its momentous ramifications?

Awareness is step 1. Do you find yourself with a lack of focus?

Whoopsie. I caught myself. I realized that the news about political culture of the USA had jumped into my daily ‘to do list’ like a bad habit. I even recognized that this new habit was taking up the time I gained when I gave up my multiplayer online game.

I recognized I didn’t want this to continue. I wanted to make an adjustment and not only get my time back, but to choose my priorities more consciously. I knew I wanted to keep appraised of further news and reactions, yet wanted to get back into the swing of my normal flow, attending to not only urgent but also important matters.

With that awareness, I made my a personal and professional decision: Hold. My. Focus.

Step 2 is diagnosing what’s going on in your specific case.

What was causing my letting go of ‘important’ when the world news calls ‘urgently’? What was the actual problem? Distractions? I found some good quotes for this:

Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.
– Zig Ziglar

Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.
– John Carmack

When walking, walk. When eating, eat.
– Zen proverb

Sometimes, it’s that you can’t be still. That you’re almost, maybe, addicted to being distracted. In a podcast I listened to yesterday, they discussed many issues that can cause lack of focus distractions:

Checking email
Checking social media
Checking the news
Checking all of the above on your phone

Or maybe it’s that you’re worried about something, and those thoughts invade your focus: worried about a loved one, a health prognosis, financial or legal issues.

Or maybe it’s darn hard to remain focused because you’re working at home now, and you simply get interrupted by other household members.

I think for me it was a combination of being worried about what I was reading in the news while being inundated with news updates to my email inbox. STAYING focused while being distracted appeared to be the difficulty.

There are various ways each of us may realize we’ve been distracted. The important part is recognizing you need to re-focus, and examining your life to see how and why you lose focus.

Step 3 is coming up with solutions.

You can’t box yourself into a one-size-fits-all answer. You have to look at what works for you personally. When you’re ready to get rid of distractions, come up with a system or process that allows you to focus and eliminate what was distracting you.

Part of my own personal solution was accepting that I had been distracted. The news was also emotionally and physically draining. Acceptance and recognition also led to me pardoning myself! We can be so tough on ourselves… or at least I can be. I had to let myself off the hook for time lost, pick up from there, and bring the re-focus.

In my case, it was a little bit of ‘cold turkey’ or forced abstinence from news during certain hours. I’m also filtering the incoming emails to a ‘read later’ folder. Best.Thing.Ever!

I’m certainly going to read the news and keep up with American culture. I’m simply re-focusing on higher priorities first.

What solutions have you found for yourself when needing to re-focus?

Have you learned helpful tactics? I’d love to hear from you about it. Drop me a line!

REBECCA HAUGH Female Voice Actor