Voice Over Tips – Lists

Generally, in most commercials or even in corporate reads you’ll have a list of features or a list of things that you need to get through and that you need to explain. Lists can be quite challenging and they can quite boring and dry, sometimes. How do you make a list a little more interesting?

I cheat. I use melody to make lists a little more interesting and dynamic. In this example we’ve got three features of a computer product. Those three features are, “With a one terabyte hard drive, half a gig of RAM, and a massive LCD screen.” That might be in the middle of a commercial.

Generally speaking, the end of a list is where I resolve the thought and finish the thought. When I say that, I mean I’m going to take the melody of that last feature, the massive LCD screen, I’m going to take that melody down and resolve it and finish the thought. That will be, “And a massive LCD screen.” I’m going to resolve that thought and finish it.

What you do before that can actually make the whole list sound a little more interesting. I’ll give you an example of where I use the same melody on all of these features and the list will sound a little monotonous. I’ll show you that example now. “With a one terabyte hard drive, half a gig of RAM, and a massive LCD screen.” The melody on each of those features was pretty much the same.

What I’m going to do now is I’m going to resolve the massive LCD screen and finish the list, and with a half a gig of RAM I’m going to take the half a gig of RAM up. I’m going to take the half a gig of RAM melody up so that then I can resolve the massive LCD screen and actually finish the list. That sounds like this. “With a one terabyte hard drive, half a gig of RAM, and a massive LCD screen.”

So the half a gig of RAM, and a massive LCD screen. If you were to draw a melody over what it is I’m saying it would look like this from your left to right. “With a one terabyte hard drive”, that’s pretty kind of static. ”With a one terabyte hard drive, half a gig of RAM, and a massive LCD screen.” I’m resolving it. The RAM is up and then I’m resolving the screen. That just breaks up the repetitiveness and the monotonous of the list and makes it a little more interesting, we hope.

I hope that helps you and good luck with your lists. I’ll see you in the next Voice Over Video series.