The importance of a producer in the voiceover process

The biggest change we have seen in our industry in the past few years has been the influx of new voice talent who work out of their own studios in their homes.  A few of these talent are excellent; a lot of others not so much.

The problem stems from the fact that most of these voice talent are newcomers to the profession – they really haven’t had all that much experience.  And they are neither voiceover producers nor are they audio engineers.

Doing excellent voiceover for eLearning requires much more than just a nice voice.  Every industry has its own language, a common set of terms and inflections that those who work in that industry understand.

For example, there’s a difference between a “color monitor” and a “color monitor” – the former is probably what you’re looking at right now, your computer screen.  The latter would be a device that somehow monitors colors, such as in a surveillance or reconnaissance application. Every industry has literally hundreds of terms like these. And if you don’t know them and read them incorrectly, your client is not going to be happy.

Therefore, the most important person in the voiceover recording process isn’t the voice talent. It’s the producer. A professional producer MUST have a comfortable familiarity with the terms of industry for which the eLearning is being developed. It’s extremely rare for a voice talent to know this. A seasoned producer, however, has worked with literally thousands of scripts across virtually every industry.

Here at Real Help, we are lucky to have one of the most seasoned veterans in the business, Tom McCaffrey. A former software engineer with an MS in Computer Science, Tom has produced over 6,000 eLearning scripts over his 20+ year career. Starting off originally in the software training field, Tom’s work expanded to encompass many major industries, including but not limited to pharma, insurance, public utilities, safety training, and many others.

The net result of all of this is that you’ll find that when you work us and with Tom, there will be much less rework on scripts than with other voice companies. They are simply right the first time. And that’s the way we always want it to be.