Video Production: Losing My Voice

With the prospect of needing to keep the flow of new videos coming out of the Museum, it wasn't a good start for me on Saturday morning. I sat thinking about having to edit together the Mystery Miniature video - and it filled me with dread. Not so much the content, but the process.

Editing the video clips together is fun, and you can quickly see everything come to life on front of your eyes - what's NOT fun is having to edit the audio.

For several reasons I record the audio separately to the video - this give me more flexibility and stops me having to multi-task too many things at once when trying to record the video (which is hard and fiddly enough as it is).

But Im not a pro voice artist, and I usually end up with around 45 minutes of audio for each 4 minutes video. With stumbles, retakes, lost threads, trying to think what to say - its a lengthy process.  And ayou can imagine, editing all that together takes a long time, cutting out waffling dialog, splicing sentences together to makes them flow faster - it was doubling the workload for every video.

And then, watching them back, I felt like the voice over wasn't really adding much to each episode - all you really need to see is the miniature being shown and demonstrated, with a little humour injected to keep it interesting.

So I decided to give it a try. I already decided to reduce the intro sequence and introduce some new music (after I discovered the Youtube in-built music library) - so I figured, why not change the whole format at the same time?

Ignoring the audio tracks that I'd already recorded, I set about editing the video with no voiceover, just the visuals and captions.

I was surprised that it worked well - in fact, the process of having to limit the 'dialog' down to fit on a few captions really stop you from needlessly waffling or dwelling on an obscure point of interest. It keeps the pace moving faster, which I like.

You can still get humour into it though the written captions - almost like they're commenting on what we're seeing on screen together - and with the little easter egg-style end videos (which are GREAT fun to do by the way).

Ive shot and edited two more new videos with no voiceover reordered at all - and they're working better and better.

So for me, losing my voice is an important step in keeping the videos tighter, and also giving it a little style of their own that doesn't follow the mainstream.

But this is an ongoing process... who knows what may change next?