Voice Overs have for years been the way to carry a narrative through a corporate or online video.

But with 75% of Facebook videos being played with the audio off, Voice Overs are almost unheard on social media.

The most common way to replace the voice over is text captions or subtitles, simply adding them to the video.

But text captions can be difficult to read, often forcing viewers to make a choice between captions or visual content.

And if we use the automated captioning that some platforms provide, these captions are often wrong.

And it gets worse.

Adding captions to a voiced video, complete with lower thirds and other graphics, can be overwhelming to a viewer.

Presenting too much information in too many forms in too short a time may lead to not understanding anything.

So instead of getting all the information you want across, you get none.

In an age when no one’s listening, visual content is paramount.

This means better imagery that conveys messages, and more thoughtfull use of text treatments to add any additional messaging..

We still need a narrative, but we must tell that visually, with text working as part of the visual content, instead of competing with it.

We are now producing more content where telling a story visually through text treatments combined with high quality imagery is the preferred choice.

This short video from Horiba is a good example of this..

This video started out with a full narration, and this was then edited down to simple messages which worked alongside the imagery.

In this case it was crucial that the messaging could be read and understood by non-native English speakers. So several versions were produced and tested with internal stakeholders, each version simplifying and refining the timings of the messages.

Talk to us to explore how we can help you communicate more effectively in your social media or corporate videos.