As part of our video package, we offer professional voiceover – but is it effective at getting potential customers to watch your video?
We talked to Andy Hoyle, a local professional voiceover artist & radio presenter about his work with us and how getting a voiceover recorded works.
This is Andy, you can follow him on Twitter here. (Photo: Andy Hoyle)
Q. How did you get into this kind of work?
Well, I first got into the sort of work through a hobby. As a teenager I volunteered at my local hospital radio station and I enjoyed the work there so much that I thought “well really I’d like to do this as a job if I can”. And you learn some really good skills and you get lots of experience through volunteering and that was certainly the case there and that allowed me to move on and get paid work in this area. Both
in radio and voiceover work. It was actually the voiceovers that came first, I can remember the very first radio commercial that I voice to a very short line, in where I played the sum of the actor Geoffrey Palmer in an advert for a rover car dealership. That was a long time ago.
Q. What is a typical working week for you?
A typical working week includes a variety of work, includes presenting radio programs. Some of those alive at different studios around the Northwest and some of them are pre-recorded. The pre-recorded produced shows, again, can be in radio station studios, some of them are produced here at my home studio.
In terms of voice work, they are sometimes recorded at a production house studio somewhere or again perhaps me contributing remotely from my home studio or recording at home and then sending the voice files on to somebody.
Andy answered his interview questions in this blog as an audio clip too, so listen above!
Q. Which Bellyflop TV videos have you voiced, and do any stick in your mind for any reason?
I’ve voiced a number of Bellyflop TV videos. There’s a great variety of work. One that particularly springs to mind is a fairly recent one for Hyde Park House. The reason is, it’s literally just around the corner from where I live.
So recording all kinds of things for all sorts of different businesses and organisations is great but it was particularly nice to be able to talk about somewhere that I actually knew in real life and that in fact, I can see out of my living room window.
You can listen to Andy’s voice in the Hyde Park House film here.
Q. What’s the process in recording voiceovers for Bellyflop TV?
The process for recording for Bellyflop TV usually involves me recording the voice-over remotely and then sending the file back to the team at Bellyflop. So the script comes to me, I record it, it gets saved to my secure cloud storage and the team at Bellyflop can then access that and use it as they need to.
If there are any amendments to the script, again they get sent to me I record remotely and the team can access that from my cloud storage.
You can listen to Andy’s voiceover in our 2016 showreel here.
Q. Why do you think professional voiceovers for website videos are effective?
If you’re investing in a website video, why would you not want the audio to be professional as well? I think it makes absolute sense to have a professional voice-over narrate your video. That’s not to say that there isn’t room for having real people talking about their experiences, or their jobs, their work that they do involved in your business or organisation. But I do think a professional voice-over does add that extra edge to the production.
Click here to read about Sophie Yates’s voiceover work.
