Documentary Narrations

Narrations for documentary films as an art sphere can compete with audiobooks as to their complexity and versatility. And a voice-over plays an important role in the overall job. This type of studio work presupposes a very careful task setting both for the sound engineer working on the film and for the voice talent who is to convey the mood and emotions of the text.

How to correctly place an order for the voiceover of a documentary film.

1. Choice of voice

It is the voice of the narrator, its tonality, the ability to convey the deep message of the text that is the basis of success in voicing documentary films. Think carefully when choosing your voice-talent, our voice catalog is divided into sections: male and female voices. Women's voices are always able to more effectively convey such feelings as tenderness, romance, sympathy, while men's voices can perfectly talk about technical innovations and sports achievements.

2. Requirements for a film voiceover

To determine the cost of work we need not only to know which exactly voice talent is going to voice the film and to have the film script. We must also know what other works should be performed by the studio. These works may include:

• cleaning the voice from takes, slips of the tongue, breath;
• voice frequency and dynamic processing and mixing the voice track with background music;
• placement of the speaker's phrases by timecodes;
• mixing the audio file and the video into the final mix.
After we have a complete understanding of the upcoming work amount, we can calculate the final cost of the entire film voiceover project.

3. Films localization into foreign languages

2voiceover Agency offers video localization services in more than 40 languages. More than 600 native narrators are at the service of our customers. When ordering documentary localization into a foreign language consider the following:

• Quality of the translation
• The correspondence of the phrase duration in the original and target languages
• If the translation is not good, the native voice-actor can refuse working with it.
• If the duration of phrases in the original and target languages differ, the synchronization of video and sound track is impossible.

4. Subtitles for documentaries

Making or localizing of subtitles is the task which is quite different from voiceover and is assessed separately.

5. Custom demo sample recording

Documentary voiceover is an important job, both for the sound engineer, the voice talent and for the client. We provide a service of a free trial recording of the script fragment by the chosen voice talent or by several ones.

6. Remote cooperation

Our studio principle is remote online cooperation when all materials are provided via the Internet. This type of cooperation allows our customers not to depend on high prices for such services in the region and not to overpay for office rent included in the prices of voiceover studios. Our customers come from such cities as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ufa, Samara, Novosibirsk, Odessa, Kiev, Dnipro and many others.

In order to start working on the documentary voice over, we need to get an exact assignment that will describe all work stages. The assignment should state the following:

• What do you want to get: the finished video or just the sound track?
• If only the sound track, should it be with musical accompaniment or only the voice? (Removal of repeated takes, sighs, pauses, editing, etc. is done by the customer himself).

If you order only dry voice-over, then in addition to the text for voiceover provide information on possible time restrictions of the text.

• Provide a reference (intonation sample) for the narrator.
• Correct text markup
• The script of the film may contain special terms, proper names, abbreviations, trade names, foreign words, etc. having two or more possible pronunciations.
• Be sure to accompany these words with an explanation that will leave only one, the only correct, pronunciation of the word.
• Please note (!): in the absence of information the studio is not responsible for the speaker's incorrect pronunciation of controversial words.
• Be sure to indicate the manner required for the text voicing. The simplest way to do this is by pointing to a fragment from the voice-actor’s demo provided on the website.

If there are time limits, check them yourself. For example, if the text fragment exceeds the time allotted for it, shorten the text. The average voicing rate is 2 words per second. The studio is not responsible for the quality of the text voiceover if this formula is ignored.