Record a voiceover

What this is about

Scripts written to be read on a page fail out loud. Long subordinate clauses, stacked nouns and numbers written as digits all trip the speaker and then the listener. Professional voice talent will smooth some of it, but no performance repairs a sentence that has no place to breathe. The second failure point is the room: an untreated office with hard walls adds a ring that no plugin fully removes. Fix the script and the room, and the recording session becomes a short, pleasant hour instead of a long negotiation with reverb.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• Read the script aloud yourself before booking anyone; every place you stumble is a place the speaker will stumble
• Cast from paid sample readings of your actual text, not from showreels of somebody else's script
• Numbers, abbreviations and product names belong in the script written the way they should be spoken
• Record two or three deliberately different reads of the opening and closing lines; the edit will want the choice
• A closet full of clothes beats an empty meeting room, and both lose to a treated booth

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Write for the ear: short sentences, one idea each, active verbs, and numbers spelled the way they are spoken. Then read the whole thing out loud and rewrite everything you stumbled over.
2. Decide the voice before casting: age range, warmth, pace, and whether the film needs authority or company. Send that description with the script rather than the word professional.
3. Cast with a paid test read of two paragraphs from the real script. Showreels prove someone can sound good on their own material; your text proves they can sound good on yours.
4. Time the script against the picture before the session. A voiceover written to the wrong length either races through the film or leaves the edit padding shots with slow motion.
5. Prepare the room or book one. A treated booth or a small soft space beats a large office, and a quiet building beats any amount of noise reduction applied afterwards.
6. Record a safety pass of the whole script at a neutral read before directing for performance. That pass covers you if the session ends early or the speaker's voice tires.
7. Direct with one concrete change at a time: slower on that sentence, lift the second half, treat this line as an aside. Adjectives like warmer produce another take of the same thing.
8. Check delivery before releasing the speaker: every line covered, alternates for the opening and the call to action, and pronunciation of names confirmed against the client's own usage.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Sending a script full of written German that nobody would ever say out loud
• Recording in a bright meeting room and spending the mix fighting the reverb
• Directing with adjectives until the speaker gives up and reads everything the same way
• Letting the speaker leave before the timing against picture has been checked

With TillyGen

TillyGen keeps the script and its timing next to the shot list, so the voiceover is written against the pictures that actually exist — and the recording session is planned as its own slot instead of squeezed in after the edit.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.