Excellent read! Love the change-ups and humanisms you added to really bring life to the script. Good changes in pacing and volume to keep it interesting. I could definitely picture you in commercial reads and corporate narration among other voice acting genres.

0:06 Be aware of any background noise/movement/clicks during recording. If you hear it happen during recording, it’s good to re-record that line as it can be difficult to edit out later.

0:19 Nice laugh you put into the read. Feels very genuine - that’s an excellent skill to bring to a script!

0:20 Read “stand” instead of “stands”. Be aware of changing words and dropping or adding “s”. 

0:26 Be careful about adding any physical slaps/claps into the recording - they may be difficult to edit into the scene later - particularly if the room reverb of the story’s space is different than your recording space. It’s usually easier for audio engineers to add sound effects (SFX) to enhance the story later rather than including them during recording.

1:22 Mispronounced “Kilagub”

There were some notable breaths/inhales in the read that can tend to stand out to listeners after a while. Keep working with the tongue twisters and practicing the SOVT exercises to increase your stamina. And practice quiet breathing/inhale techniques to reduce the overall loudness of breaths. This is a skill and takes practice. Breaths and breathing are perfectly normal and expected, but if they stand out too much they can take the listener out of the story. Audio engineers can reduce the loudness of breaths too, but if a project is smaller they may not have an audio engineer, so it’s something to be aware of when recording as a performance technique.

Generally a good distance between the microphone and your mouth as you are recording, as a rule of thumb, is the space between your pinky and thumb when they are extended apart from each other. Try to have waveform peaks for yelling/loud projection land between -9 dB and -3 dB. For normal talking, try to have the waveform peaks between -12 and -6 dB. Shoot for -3dB of headroom. You may need to adjust your gain for louder and quieter parts; if so, it helps to know where to turn the gain to in order to achieve optimal levels during recording. Having the microphone input pointed at your mouth but offset to one side maybe 20-30 degrees can help reduce plosives.

When you’re ready to take the next step to improve your voiceover recording, you will want to look into treating your recording space with acoustic foam (we recommend 4” thick) and/or blankets to help reduce the reflections and reverb in the space. Basically covering any hard, reflective surfaces that sound bounces off of with soft materials like blankets or towels, etc. It’s not necessary for this class however as we are just focusing on the basics of voice acting, but something to think about as you progress in your journey.

For the purpose of this homework to work on articulation and projection, the read was generally very good overall, but there were places where you could have really worked to hit all of the letters in the words and made sure they were clearly spoken. Make sure you don’t lose the ends of words when practicing these qualities. In natural speaking, the ends tend to fall off or not be hit hard, but exercising and strengthening the quality to fully pronounce words is an excellent tool to have in your tool box. When practicing articulation and enunciation it’s good to over-do it.

If you repeat the “B”, “G” and “K” sounds this exercise focused on, note the placement of your tongue and mouth as you make them and use this knowledge as you practice articulation in your read. The tongue twisters will also help so keep having fun playing around with those as well. Vocal warmups help loosen the tongue and vocal cords and will make it easier to pronounce the words. Other exercises, such as the Peter Padderton script is another good one for practicing “P”, “T” and “D” letters. That cork trick Burger showed in class is also very helpful to practice over-articulating to make words easier to say.

Don’t forget to include the tongue twisters with your homework going forward. :)

Overall, fantastic read! Keep up the great work!