technology 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.

Collaboration Platforms in 2020

accountability, business, creative professionals, small business, VO tech

Collaboration Platforms?

The year 2020 brought us a great, big, (ugly) new reason to work remotely from home. Although I’ve been working from home and am celebrating my 10th year anniversary, 2020 even brought me and you – us all – new collaboration tools.

A vital collaboration platform or app is one you can use easily and share with internal employees or external clients easily. You use it to organize, plan, execute projects, and offer media assets to be reviewed or changed. Put simply, it’s any piece of online software that helps people get work done together in teams.

Collaboration platforms have been multiplying as long as I’ve been in business. The year 2020 pushed the use of them to new levels. My clients have shared many tools with me as I travel with them on their project timeline and make my contribution. I’m really impressed and excited by how many companies and people have truly embraced this tech.

Below is a curated list of impressive tools I’ve come across. I use only a few regularly but I really appreciate the strength and agility this gives to so many.

Before I share the list, I have to say this: CONGRATULATIONS to all of you who transitioned to working from home due to a pandemic! The temerity to keep going through this very difficult time, to keep the work flowing, to keep the world somewhat sane – THANK YOU! Take a moment to look at what you’ve been able to achieve, especially without having seen this coming. WOW.

Tools I’ve used regularly

Google Workspace: Formerly called GSuite, now it’s Google Workspace. It holds all the online versions of Office as well as connects to email. I use this daily and have for years. It’s very effective for when I travel, also for my virtual assistant and I to work on shared documents. It’s also useful for surveys you can do with Forms.

Trello: Has an intriguing interface that lets you drag task cards across columns. It’s easy to learn and works well for monitoring projects and assigning tasks. Project management, task assignments, prioritization. Fully customizable. I use this a few times a month with my virtual assistant.

Slack: Started as a simple messaging system and has turned into a scalable, integrated, customizable collaboration tool. Project management, task assignments, prioritization. Fully customizable

Tools clients have shared with me

Wipster: Built for creative teams that need to share a lot of assets, deal with visual and audio materials, client sign-offs, etc.

Basecamp: Project management, task assignments, prioritization, internal communications. Increase organization and communication, with fewer meetings (hopefully). Fully customizable.

Other tools that seem to have good reputations

From a bit of research I recently did, the following three were suggested by some of my LinkedIn connections. These appear to offer project management, task assignments, prioritization, person-to-person video chat and screen sharing. Fully customizable and integrations available. Flowdock even seems to have the capability to adjust time zones per person.

Asana
Flowdock
Ora

Contact me directly with any other good platform suggestions!

My email is at the top of this page.

REBECCA HAUGH Female Voice Actor