I loved your take! I would absolutely listen to the rest of this audiobook; You had great dynamism!

Great read! I liked how you had quieter moments but also more energetic and louder moments. It creates movement and flow in your storytelling and helps to take the listener through a story; keeping them engaged.

0:57 Nice humanisms you inserted here and there to bring the read to life. 

1:04 Mispronounced “carotenoid”. Don’t be afraid to look up how to pronounce words online if you aren’t familiar with them. Some great reference sources include Cambridge Dictionary (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/), youglish.com, forvo.com and You Tube Videos among other places (there’s a lot of options out there). You can simply type in “How to pronounce [word]” in Google search and it should give you several references. Try to avoid the robot / AI-sounding ones though.

1:05 Nice change-up in the way you spoke this line - it felt like you were responding to your audience’s reaction as you spoke. Well done!1:29 Read “I would often” instead of “often I would”

1:33 Read “kind” instead of “kinds”. Be aware of changing words and dropping or adding “s”. 

1:37 Added word “of”

I feel like you may have lost your character in the middle of the read, but found it again by the ending returning to the similar composure and pacing. Be sure to maintain your character all the way through even through the emotional ups and downs.

Don’t forget to tell us who your audience and demographics are in your homework. Really consider specifics of who, what, where, when, why and how. Think about how your audience is dynamically responding to you as you speak to them. This will continue to help bring the script to life and lift the words off the page.

Be sure you are pronouncing all parts of the words including the last letters which are easy to “lose” when reading. While we weren’t specifically focusing on articulation and enunciation in this homework, I did note a number of places where the endings of your words kind of fell off and weren’t fully pronounced. I encourage you to continue practicing this skill and strengthening it. When practicing articulation and enunciation it’s good to over-do it. Use the cork trick to practice like Burger showed in class. Even without it, over-articulate and be sure to clearly hit all the letters and parts of the word including the ending letters. Being able to clearly enunciate and articulate very well becomes a very useful tool in your voice acting toolbox to use or not to use as needed.

Staying well hydrated will help to reduce mouth clicks during recording. A good rule of thumb is to hydrate well a couple of hours before recording and drink water in between as you’re recording to stay hydrated. 

As you progress with voice acting, investing in the RX series mouth declick plug-in is a very useful and worthwhile tool to have at your disposal to help keep the recording as clean as possible. 

Generally your audio levels I felt were good, but dropping this here for reference: Generally a good distance from your microphone as a rule of thumb is the space between your pinky and thumb when they are extended apart from each other. For louder talking/yelling you may need to increase the distance a little and/or lower the gain. Having the microphone input pointed at your mouth but offset to one side maybe 20-30 degrees can help reduce plosives. 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. 

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.

Keep up the great work!