Brand Video With Voiceover

This was a project I completed as part of my day job working at Audigy. We hold a training event several times a year called Patients for Life, and we needed a video to introduce some of the new messaging and look behind our AGX Hearing brand. Previously, we had delivered information like this through Powerpoint. By creating a video, we could ensure a consistent delivery for the information, as well as introduce music to help provide a feeling to the intended audience.

I call these video slideshows, although I’m not sure that is an industry term. Projects like these have really been instrumental in teaching me more about video, specifically animation.

My personal style is to use very simple shapes, clean fonts, bold colors and animation. I also pride myself on timing on-screen elements and narration with music. That is what I focused on when thinking about this project.

I started with the narration. Working with a coworker, we recorded a voice over track that consisted of reading aloud with the slide text. Later, I would remove the slide text from the PowerPoint deck completely to animate it in Final Cut, but it was useful to keep in at this stage.

Next, I looked for music. My typical first stop is Marmoset, which has a great selection of music to license for your projects. I recorded a podcast episode with these guys a while back, and learned a lot from them on music and scoring for podcasts. What I like about Marmoset’s web site is the ability to search for different themes in music – a story, a type of character, a mood or feeling. I usually can find something pretty great without much effort.

The song I chose was called Blooms. It had some nice energy and some interesting sounds that popped in every now and again. I figured I could naturally weave my voiceover with this song, so I went with it.

After finding the music for the video, I brought both the music and the recorded audio from the voiceover into Logic Pro X, my preferred DAW. I chopped up the voiceover by slide, and applied some tools to clean up the overall sound. This particular voiceover was recorded in an office, but there was lots of noise from the hallway, from the outside as its a corner office near 2 fairly busy streets. So I used RX Advanced, which was gifted to me by friends at iZotope after talking to them on another podcast I recorded. This is something I haven’t been good at for a while (surgical noise removal), however I feel like I finally learned the best approach to using this amazing piece of software. I’m happy with how it turned out!

So now I time the individual clips for the voiceover to the music by laying them all out on a timeline. There are a few ways to do this. For this project, I did this timing in Logic and then bounced down to a single, cleaned audio track. You can also do it in Final Cut, where you use markers to mark beats or changes in the music you want to time transitions to. In the future, I’ll do it in FCPX, but this time I stuck to what I knew better which was Logic.

Timing transitions to beats can be pretty laborious, but its subtle and I think subconsciously powerful in some way. It’s a small attention to detail, but worth it to me.

After bringing the cleaned, timed out audio into Final Cut I went on to bring in the Powerpoint slides, and added simple text animations. Finally, to add a little movement I incorporated subtle Ken Burns on the slides themselves, as well as some animated waves as an overlay on top of the slides. None of this was meant to be prominent but instead, something just to minimize the fact that the visuals were static.