Voiceover for Corporate Videos
A common voiceover request I get time again is for corporate voiceover. Most commonly, they tend to be internal projects used in training courses or safety demonstrations for employees within a company. However, there are lots of other types of projects that also come under this heading…
What are ‘Corporate Videos’?
Corporate videos generally tend to be videos used for learning, demonstrating or instructing. They are informative, practical, and not used to advertise a product or service.
Sometimes the video may be available to the public, for example, I recently voiced a corporate video for a solicitor’s firm, informing tenants what their rights were when it came to renting.
Sometimes the video may be for internal use only, meaning that only people employed within that company have access to it – perhaps it’s used for further training or might be an introductory welcome video to the company.
Corporate videos can also demonstrate or explain how to conduct a task. In the voiceover industry, these videos are usually referred to as ‘Explainers’, but they fall under the ‘Corporate’ heading too.
For example, I was asked to voice an explainer video that instructed candidates who were due to sit an exam on what they could expect on the day of the exam.
What to expect…
Scripts for corporate voiceovers tend to be very jargon-heavy and sometimes quite wordy. If it’s for a project that’s to be viewed by members of the public, then the language used will be a lot more accessible, but if it’s for an internal project, the language could be a lot more technical.
I have voiced corporate videos for software or cyber security companies where I have no clue what I’m saying. Often these scripts contain words that I’ve never even heard of and sound like gobbledygook to me. I don’t need to know what I’m talking about, but it’s my job as the voiceover artist to make it sound like I know what I’m talking about.
If you are booked to do a corporate voiceover and there are words that you’re unsure how to pronounce, always ask the client to pronounce them for you or spell them out phonetically. There is no shame in doing this as they will be well aware that a lot of the wording won’t mean anything to a layperson like yourself. If there are any words or sentences you are particularly struggling with, go over them again and again, really sounding out each syllable until the words relax in your mouth, because when you come to record, you don’t want it to sound like you’re stumbling over what you’re saying!
Hire a professional like me to narrate your corporate videos. Check out the video below for the most recent corporate video I worked on for ‘Haystack ID’. If you’d like me to narrate your corporate project, please contact me!
