How to brief a voiceover in five lines
Most revision rounds are caused by the brief, not the read. Five lines will usually eliminate them.
Almost every time a voiceover comes back wrong, the fault is upstream. The read was a reasonable interpretation of an under-specified brief. Here is what actually needs to be in the email. ## 1. Who is talking, and to whom Not 'professional and friendly' — that describes nearly every commercial ever made. Say 'a bank manager who genuinely likes their customers', or 'someone explaining this to a colleague at the next desk'. Character beats adjectives every time, and it is what lets us cast the right voice rather than guess. ## 2. The audience and the language English, Shona or Ndebele — and if English, whose English. A youth campaign and a corporate announcement are not the same read even when the script is identical. This one line usually determines which voice the brief goes to. ## 3. Where it runs and for how long Radio, TV, online, in-store, internal. National or one market. Three months or twelve. This drives the licensing, and getting it up front means one number instead of a renegotiation. ## 4. The hard constraints Slot length to the second. Pronunciation of any name, place or product that could go either way. Any word the legal team needs emphasised. A reference spot you like, with one sentence on why — that single link does more work than three paragraphs of description. ## 5. The deadline, honestly The real one, not the padded one. A studio that knows the true deadline can tell you whether it is possible. A studio working from a padded one will fill the padding. > Five lines. Under two minutes to write. It routinely saves a full revision round, which is a day. The scripts that come back right first time are almost never the shortest or the simplest. They are the ones where somebody spent two minutes saying what they actually wanted.