0291 – ‘Reading In’

Get A Better Broadcast, Podcast and Voice-Over Voice

English - October 17, 2021 23:01 - 4 minutes - 3.02 MB - ★★★★ - 4 ratings
Arts Business voiceover your speaking voice voice over training voiceover hour voiceover social Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed

Previous Episode: 0290 – Grades Of Lifting And Subduing

Next Episode: 0292 – 3 – Synonyms: simple and advanced

2021.10.18 – 0291 – ‘Reading In’

In broadcast newsrooms, the person who writes the introduction to a story (the cue) may not be the person who goes on and actually records the script of the story itself. That’s because larger newsrooms might have specialist writer and those who are on-air. In smaller newsrooms it’s because the newsreader (who will read the cue on air) is usually the person who finds and writes the whole story and asks a colleague to ‘voice up’ the main report (a ‘voicer’). The problem comes when the ‘voicer-upper’ doesn’t read the cue, before they record their script. And that leads to an ‘unintentional intonational disconnect’ between what the (live) presenter says and what the (recorded) reporter says, when the listener hears the story as a ‘single unit’.

So the reporter needs to read the cue to themselves before they record their script, so they can get the ‘carry-on’ sense of the script and present it in the same way that the listener will hear it. Otherwise, in this story, the reporter might highlight “city”, a word that doesn’t need to be drawn attention to, because it’s a substitute for “Brighton” mentioned a few seconds earlier, albeit by someone else.

“A 17-year-old boy's been arrested on suspicion of murder after a body of a woman was found in Brighton. The 69-year-old victim and the boy are known to each other. Peter Porter has more:

Police were called to an address in Cedars Gardens in the Withdean area of the city just before 7 last night where the body of the 69-year-old woman was found….”

OK. How would you read this sentence?

“People often take water from the well in the belief that it makes them feel well.”

I’m sure that you coloured both uses of the word “well” even though they mean different things. So yes, don’t be thrown by homonyms: it’s the re-introduction of a word with the same meaning that we supress, not the actual same word.

However, if the passage continued: “The well is said to be a thousand years old…” Then that word with that meaning is old, and so you drop your intonation for it.

Through these around-5-minute episodes, you can build your confidence and competence with advice on breathing and reading, inflection and

projection, the roles played by better scripting and better sitting, mic techniques and voice care tips... with exercises and anecdotes from a career

spent in TV and radio studios. If you're wondering about how to start a podcast, or have had one for a while - download every episode!

And as themes develop over the weeks (that is, they are not random topics day-by-day), this is a free, course to help you GET A BETTER

BROADCAST, PODCAST AND VIDEO VOICE.

Look out for more details of the book during 2021.

Contacts: https://linktr.ee/Peter_Stewart

Peter has been around voice and audio all his working life and has trained hundreds of broadcasters in all styles of radio from pop music stations such as Capital FM and BBC Radio 1 to Heart FM, the classical music station BBC Radio 3 and regional BBC stations. He’s trained news presenters on regional TV, the BBC News Channel and on flagship programmes such as the BBC’s Panorama. Other trainees have been music presenters, breakfast show hosts, travel news presenters and voice-over artists.

He has written a number of books on audio and video presentation and production (“Essential Radio Journalism”, “JournoLists”, two editions of “Essential Radio Skills” and three editions of “Broadcast Journalism”) and has written on voice and presentation skills in the BBC’s in-house newspaper “Ariel”.

Peter has presented hundreds of radio shows (you may have heard him on BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 4, Virgin Radio or Kiss, as well as BBC regional radio) with formats as diverse as music-presentation, interview shows, ‘special’ programmes for elections and budgets, live outside broadcasts and commentaries and even the occasional sports, gardening and dedication programmes. He has read several thousand news bulletins, and hosted nearly 2,000 podcast episodes, and is a vocal image consultant advising in all aspects of voice and speech training for presenters on radio and TV, podcasts and YouTube, voiceovers and videocalls.

The podcast title refers to those who may wish to change their speaking voice in some way. It is not a suggestion that anyone should, or be pressured into needing to. We love accents and dialects, and are well aware that how we speak changes over time. The key is: is your voice successfully communicating your message, so it is being understood (and potentially being acted upon) by your target audience?

This podcast is London-based and examples are spoken in the RP (Received Pronunciation) / standard-English / BBC English pronunciation, although invariably applicable to other languages, accents and dialects.

Music credits:

"Bleeping Demo" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/7012-bleeping-demo