Communicating your marketing message clearly and completely in a quick video can be serious challenge. While it helps to distill the message down to its core and keep the script tight, sometimes just using the right tools can maximize the bang for your video marketing buck.
Voice Over is one of those tools. Putting voice over with b-roll is a great way to both show and tell a marketing story. B-roll is supplemental footage inserted as a cutaway to help tell the story. Keeping the talent is on screen limits the information you can convey. With b-roll and voice over you can paint a picture visually and still provide all the details the audience needs.
Your video images may or may not sync up with the voice over. A voice over may be describing what the audience is seeing, or it may be unrelated, depending on the objective. Here’s an example of b-roll with voice over combined with straight-to-camera dialogue:
This particular example allows the audience to get to know multiple aspects of Dr. Burcham in less than one minute. You see his creativity in the beginning, followed by patient interaction, testimonials, and then the exterior and location of his office. His services are listed in the voice over.
An added bonus of using voice over is being able to talk about yourself in third person. If Dr. Burcham himself listed all his accolades and praised his own abilities, it would obviously come across the wrong way. A voice over allows someone else say good things about his work.
A second voice over option, and a Premier specialty, is custom character voices. Character voices work well for animated videos and more imaginative video roles.
Here in this video we did a airplane captain custom character voice. Nashville Airsoft wanted to make their instructional video sound like preflight instructions. Using an airsoft mask we were able to cover the speaker’s face so the mouth and voice over did not have to match up perfectly.
Voice over gives your video a powerful tool with flexible options. Use it in your next video to liven up a character, or maximize your marketing message.