The voice over brief is an essential part of any successful recording project.
Voice overs can be the defining aspect of a project, making a well-crafted brief essential for ensuring the talent delivers the perfect performance.
Your brief should be clear and concise, even though it can be challenging to find the time under pressure. Even the best talent may not meet your expectations if they don’t fully understand your goals. Providing the voice actor with relevant project details helps them get the performance right on the first try, saving you from revisions and re-records later.
To simplify the process, we’ve created a handy guide on how to brief a voice over artist, which you can use as a checklist to ensure a comprehensive brief for any casting.
The ‘Big Picture’
The ‘Big Picture’ can apply to two things: the project and the company.
So, if you’re making an advert for a brand like Lush, you need to explain a bit about the company’s public image. In this case, it’s a sustainable, eco-friendly, vaguely ‘hippy’ organisation.
You also need to set out the project’s overall message, mainly if it differs in any way from the broader company image. For example, if Lush wanted a more instructional, authoritative tone than their brand implies, it is essential to highlight this briefly.
Treading the fine line between this juxtaposition is what a professional voice actor will be best at, but they need to know what you need in the first place to be able to do it!
Audience Composition
The voice actor will need to know the likely size and constitution of the audience. It helps if you articulate who makes up your intended audience – the demographic.
- What do they like?
- How old are they?
- What country are they in, or even more specifically, what region?
- What cultural values do they share?
- What lifestyle do they have, and (more importantly for commercials) what lifestyle do they want?
These are just some of the questions you need to ask at this stage. Similar to the other elements we’ve mentioned, this can be a relatively short description.
An explainer voice over about using a new banking app will probably have a different audience than an Instagram promo for a perfume. And this is a crucial point! The voice over artist needs to know with whom they are speaking because it helps set the tone or vibe.
Usage Terms
Ideally, formal usage terms should always be concrete before you even get to the stage of creating the voice over brief.
The usage terms are vital for establishing the fees payable to the artist. If it’s an advert, additional usage fees will almost always be applicable, but if it’s internal training for a mid-size company, there most likely won’t be any.
How you will use the voice over is one of the most critical parts of a brief, and it should be related to the budget. Finalising the budget and the scope of the finished product can have a surprising impact on the performance.
A voice actor can play it big, small, or anywhere in between. The key takeaway here is:
- What is the voice over for? e.g. a toy product, a video game, a TV advertisement etc.
- What duration is the usage term? e.g. in perpetuity, one month, one year etc.
- Are there any potential uplifts in the usage in the future?
The Budget
It’s incredible the number of customers who contact us without any idea of their budget. Many online resources provide some education about fair rates for voice over, including our voice over rates guide here.
Remember, if you’re contacting an agency like Voquent, don’t expect to pay freelancer rates – agencies provide a service. At Voquent, we invest a significant amount of time in vetting the talent available for casting. Our team of producers is also expert in sourcing the best voices for the role and ensuring top-notch audio quality.
However, if you don’t need this extra level of service and have the time to vet talent yourself, it is probably best to go to freelancers directly rather than expecting an agency to match your low budget.
Break your budget down as follows:
- basic session fees (to include the talent, recording and post-production)
- usage fees (paid to the talent if using the voice-over in a commercial application or advertisement)
Tone
Tone: the shortest word, with basically infinite descriptions. We like to focus on tone here at Voquent because we think it can often be the single most crucial thing to determine how the vibe of voice over.
We have 12 tonal categories for voice actors on our website search, which can be a valuable place to start. These include terms like authoritative, nurturing, conversational and many more.
The voice actor needs to know what sort of thing you’re going for and create that from scratch. Of course, if you had an exact audio reference for what you wanted the voice over to sound like, you wouldn’t need to hire the actor in the first place since you’d already had it!
Voice actors are creatives at the end of the day, as you may be too. So, think about the sort of information you would like to create a video or animation and try and translate that into the voice brief.
Learn more about vocal characteristics.
References Materials
If you create a new voice over from scratch, you won’t have the exact reference via another source, but you will almost certainly have some reference material. This can be as simple as the Demo Sample you shortlisted or the talents Reel(s).
It could even be a scratch read from someone else (or yourself) where you try to emulate the tone and delivery pace and style you need.
Other reference materials include other videos from outside sources with a similar style to what you’re trying to achieve, or other videos in the same series that have different voice actors.
The more examples for the talent to emulate – the better. Even a slideshow of what will eventually become the finished video can help. Seeing the visual style of the project, even before it’s finished, can be helpful for the ‘big picture’.
Explore voice actors’ Demos now >
A good brief instructs a great performance
A fully detailed voice over brief can be the difference between a good performance and an amazing performance.
The more you can articulate what you want, the more the voice-over artist will be able to match the voice you have in your head. Always be as clear and detailed as possible.
While you don’t want to make it too long, there’s no need to keep the brief too short.
Live direction and real-time feedback can also be helpful, but it’s you still need to have a solid brief for both yourself and the voice actor before voice actor casting begins.
We hope the checklist was helpful, and we would love to hear about your voiceover projects!
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