I’d Rather Be Writing – Tom Johnson

Voiceover professionals often recommend that you smile while you narrate. Smiling injects a touch of warmth and charisma in your voice. Just a few touches here and there can make the entire tone of your voice noticeably warmer.

I recorded three samples for comparison. In the first, I just read a paragraph in my normal reading voice. In the second, I actually scrunched my eyebrows down in anger. In the third, I smiled. Listen to the differences.

Just reading normally

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With eyebrows scrunched down in anger

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Smiling while reading

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Getting close to your microphone usually results in something called “the proximity effect.” As you get close, most microphones amplify your voice in a rich, deep way. The proximity effect can make you sound like a late-night DJ. Some microphones give you the best proximity effect when you’re practically kissing the mic.

Unfortunately, as you get closer to a microphone, the microphone starts to pick up more sounds from your mouth. Say the word “pick” or “pull” and you unleash a gust of wind toward the mic. Really, hold your hand up two inches from your mouth and say a few P or B words. Can you feel the gust? To your microphone, the puff is like a tsunami sound wave. This burst of air is known as a plosive. Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago I was gathering feedback on different tech comm deliverables. I asked a user if she preferred videos or written material when learning software. I thought she would immediately say “videos,” but it was a toss up for her. In her mind, videos involved long stretches of narration that included sitting passively at her computer, waiting for the narrator to get to her question but never really getting there.

A lot of people feel the same way about videos. In a recent post, Kristi Leach explains an attitude she once held about instructional videos:

I rarely appreciate video instructions, either–they take too long, because I’m pausing, following the step, playing, pausing again. I was having trouble imagining how videos were going to improve our help systems or fit into our schedules.

For Kristi, prior to her turnaround screencast moment, videos seemed to take too long and were difficult to follow along with in a step-by-step way.

When you write a script for a video (or when you create a general outline), you can avoid the problem of the eternal video — which I refer to as a sense of rambling — by simply keeping the video short. Don’t try to cover too much ground. You can generally speak about 100 words a minute, so keep that in mind with your script. 200 words is a good length. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my goals in creating engaging video tutorials is to develop a warm, personable, natural voice, like the voice of an encouraging friend or mentor.

In search of this more personable voice, last year I attended a voiceover workshop in my area. The voiceover coach explained that good voiceover artists start by imagining a situation—in their minds they imagine who they are, who they’re talking to, and what kind of situation and environment they’re in.

Voiceover artists have to stick carefully with the script they’ve been given, my coach explained. But they can inflect, add emphasis to control meaning, and play with the rhythm and intonation to bring it to life.

People told me that if I want to focus on the audio like this, I would be better off narrating the audio first and then recording the screen later—in two separate steps, rather than at the same time. I recorded at least 40 different video tutorials like this, narrating first (while trying to imagine myself in a situation); after recording the narration, I listened to the narration while following along to record the screen. Syncing it up took a little practice, but not much.

No matter how hard I tried, though, the narration always sounded stiff, slow, and a little dull. If I put too much inflection and rhythm into it, the narration sounded cheesy and fake. Maybe a background in acting would make it sound as if I weren’t reading a script, but I could never figure this acting thing out. It never sounded completely natural. Read the rest of this entry »

For several months I’ve been looking for a quiet room to record screencasts at my work. Our building has four floors for more than 600 IT professionals. I investigated more than 20 conference rooms, poked my head in empty offices, walked around unfamiliar floors, inquired here and there.

When people see my looking, they don’t understand what I mean by a “quiet” room. What does quiet mean? Stop and listen to the sounds around you. The fan, a ticking clock, a rumbling from a dishwasher or dryer, the hum of the lights, the sound of non-descript white noise, voices from a neighboring office, or cars passing by outside. The sounds are subtle, but when you start recording, these noises amplify onto your audio track.

That’s why you need a quiet room. If you have your own private office, great. If you have to schedule time in a conference room, that can also work. You usually have to work with what you’ve been given.

But let’s say you want something more — your own private recording room, where you can set up your equipment, lock the door, record is perfect silence, and come and go whenever you please, without worrying about someone playing with your expensive microphone. Read the rest of this entry »

At the upcoming STC Summit, I’m presenting a session called “Developing a Personal Voice in Audio.” In this presentation, I’ll explain how to “deliver video tutorials with a friendly, personable voice by implementing several audio techniques common to professional voice talents and sound engineers.

One way I prepare for presentations is by writing a series of blog posts about the topic. So over the next two weeks, I’m going to write 10 posts about developing a personal voice in audio. The ten topics will most likely be as follows:

1. Finding an acoustic environment.
2. Sounding natural.
3. Avoiding a sense of rambling.
4. Setting up your microphone.
5. Controlling your breathing.
6. Rehearsing the script.
7. Imagining a scenario.
8. Dealing with mistakes.
9. Post-processing the audio.
10. Improving your voice.

I admit that I feel like a novice with this topic. I’m not a voiceover professional, sound engineer, or e-learning guru. I do podcasting and screencasting. But voice is a topic I’ve been enthusiastic about for a long time.

In an effort to give more visibility and exposure to the companies who advertise on my site, I’m providing a regular “Messages from the Sponsors” post. In this post, I asked my sponsors if they have any messages they would like me to share with my readers. Since it was the first time I asked this, not everyone was ready with content, but two of them (Scriptorium and Madcap Software) did provide messages, which I’ve inserted below.   Read the rest of this entry »

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Length: 45 min.

Flare 6 is available today from Madcap Software. This weekend I interviewed Mike Hamilton, VP of Product Management, about the new features Flare 6 contains. In this podcast, we talk about five of the new features in Flare:

• Batch processing GUI and macro targets
• Topic metadata (e.g., owner, status)
• The new link viewer
• Mobile targets
• Multimedia integration

Mike also mentions some user interface improvements, usability refinements, and hints at upcoming integrations with SharePoint later this year or early next.

Check out Flare 6 on Madcap Software’s site. And if you’re looking for Mike Hamilton’s blog, see http://madcapsoftware2.wordpress.com. You can contact Mike by email at mhamilton@madcapsoftware.com.

With the Flare 6 release, I’m particularly excited about the multimedia integration and link viewer. I signed up for the beta but have been so busy with an upcoming project release that I haven’t had time to evaluate it. Madcap was kind enough to upgrade me to version 6 as a thank-you for the podcast, so I’ll probably be posting about the multimedia integration soon (along with some screencasts using my new mic).

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Length: 80 min.

In this podcast, Michael Hiatt at mashstream.com presents to the STC Intermountain chapter on documentation in the cloud. By documentation in the cloud, he’s referring to our move to the web of everything we do on the computer — the running of applications, the saving of our data, the way we access and interact with all the information. He covers at a lot of ground in this presentation, touching on web 2.0, web 3.0, the semantic web, knowledge mashups, documentation mashups, lifestreaming, linked data, meshing, raw data,  and more. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s always hard to tell exactly why or how a site gets hacked. One of the WordPress sites I created for a client kept getting hacked. I took more extreme security measures, changing the database table prefix, adding an htaccess file to wp-admin that filtered IP addresses, adding a plugin to encrypt logins, adding a firewall, moving wp-config to another directory, and other measures. I thought the problem was with WordPress.

Then last weekend, I checked the site, and it was totally gone. Completely? Yeah, completely. I logged into cPanel and the entire database had been deleted. Previous hacks had just deleted all posts, pages, and users tables in the database. Now the hacker turned it up a level and deleted the entire database.  Read the rest of this entry »