Dissolve Ideas for Creators

Four words, many meanings

Written by Dissolve | Jan 9, 2014 3:53:10 PM

We recently worked with Voices.com on this cool project. With no brief other than to create a showreel with voiceovers, we explored all sorts of ways to pair our stock footage with the voice talents of Voices.com.

We landed on applying the classic storytelling idiom “The rest is history” across 10 different genres, including crime drama, infomercial, kids’ show, and foreign art film. (We really wanted to put the footage and voices to the test.)

Voices.com gave us lots of auditions to consider. Because the two actors would be doing up to 10 takes on the same phrase, their individual range was critical. In the end, Rhiannon Boulger and Lucas Schuneman worked with us on Skype, cheerfully recording takes under our super-technical instructions: “More robot,” “Less sexy,” “More cheesy sales guy.”

Some of their takes inspired designer Drew Ng-How-Tseung to go down a different path than we’d originally envisioned, but that was part of the fun … playing with the footage and voices to morph the meaning of this one simple phrase across so many different styles.

See the clips used in this reel — they’re all available for licensing. To find a voice talent, check out Voices.com.
It has more than 100,000 voice actors covering pretty much every genre and language you can think of. If you’re thinking about using voiceover, our post How to give your story a voice gets you started by outlining the five most common voiceover roles.