Video’s Stepchildren: Writing, Audio, and Soundtracks

If you work in eLearning, you might be makingvideo. If you’re not making video, you are certainly making slides withnarration. Slides have been around for at least 75 years. Video hasn’t beenaround nearly as long, and it’s still a growing phenomenon in eLearning. Ittook long enough. OK, we’re making more video, but are we making really goodvideo? Are we using the medium to its best advantage? How can we help ourlearning audience really get engaged with the video?

What I want to suggest in this article isthat what makes really good video is more than what people see. Much of whatmakes video engaging, what makes it real, is what people hear during the video. While we’re making video we record some sound,to be sure, but we don’t often take the sound we record and make that into a “soundtrack”to go with the video. I am going to share some secrets with you. People winAcademy Awards for sound editing, and there’s a reason for that! (Maybe weshould give awards for sound editing in eLearning video.)

What is a soundtrack, and whyshould you care?

Is a soundtrack different from an audiotrack? Both are audio tracks. How is a soundtrack different from a soundrecording? A sound recording is exactly that: a recording of what a microphone“hears,” most often the human voice. The concept of a soundtrack is to create asonic environment. A sonicenvironment is built of all sorts of different sounds: the spoken word, ambientsounds of all sorts, and perhaps sound effects. By itself, the human voice, evenwhen well recorded, can be flat and two-dimensional, at least in the setting ofa video. If you record in a studio, the goal is to keep any background noiseout of the sound you record. You hear a voice. That’s all. Does a voice byitself carry a story for video? On the surface, yes, but it doesn’t tell thewhole story. Are you making your learning audience “buy into” the story you’retrying to tell? Damien Bruyndonckx, a speaker at DevLearn 2015, said, “An audio soundtrack gives video the thirddimension.” So how do we go about creating the third dimension for our videoprojects?

First, you have to write it

An eLearning script starts with the writtenword. First, write everything you hear, including all the sound effects andambient sounds as well as the dialogue. As a writer, you need to “visualize” thesoundtrack in your head. This is something that professional video and cinemascript writers do. Why? What’s the best way to think about your audio and sounds?Where is your audience? Transport them there by thinking what it would sound likewithout dialogue or narration.

Frequently during training design anddevelopment projects, the instructional designer is the writer as well. Whilemost instructional designers receive training in writing instructional material,it’s not the same as writing dialogue or narration for video. Unless you’re anexperienced dialogue writer, writing dialogue is one of the most difficultthings you can do. Good narration and dialogue sound natural. They feel spontaneous.Good narration and dialogue propel the story. Bad dialogue isn’t really heard.It’s just bad.

The other half of writing a script foreLearning is the sonic environment. Is the action taking place on the floor ofa factory? Or in a big room where people are working in a call center? Thesonic environment is what “sells” the story to the learner.

Script development starts with thebudget!

eLearning project budgets usually allocate toofew dollars for script development and sound recording. There are lots moredollars for Storyline, Captivate, or other development tools. Clients expectthe script to come with the instructional design. The two are treated as oneand the same. They’re not, but seldom is there also an expectation that thescript comes from the instructional design. Frequently, it feels (and sounds) tome as though the script and sounds are an afterthought.

Dialogue or narration, along with soundrecording, should be a separate items in a budget. How much of the budget? Agood rule of thumb would be 25 to 30 percent. A good script can take thelearning concepts and goals and give them a life outside of rote training. Agood script doesn’t go by the numbers. At many conferences, I’ve heard speakersmake statements or teach about sound, but not about the sonic environment. Perhapsit’s the advent of video into our eLearning mix that’s not just slides andvoice-over to make our training point. It’s a hard sell to get the right moneyallocated to script writing and dialogue writing and assign the correct amountof funding for the soundtrack. Bad scripts and lack of sound design do not helpthe success of our projects, that’s for sure.

Soundtracks are different from recordedaudio

What do I mean by a soundtrack? It’s a goodquestion. A voice recorded in a studio is technically a soundtrack. A nice vocalrecording is most assuredly not a soundtrack. I call it flat. I call it boring.I call it not teaching anything, but just pushing information. Yes, informationpush is part of what we do. We will never get away from that, since it’s aprimary part of learning and training. Video, though, has the power to beimmersive and transformative. If we don’t make it immersive, then it’s our bad,so we should look for ways to do it

So what exactly is a soundtrack? First,listen to these two soundtracks.

Mad Men:

The Firesign Theatre:

The first soundtrack was from Mad Men. Many of the Emmys awarded to the show during its run werefor sound recording. In this particular soundtrack, I counted at least 15different sounds. Listen to it again very closely. Put on headphones just likea sound engineer would. It starts out with a Bellini aria that then goes underthe dialogue; there are all sorts of other sounds in the mix that make up thesonic environment you’re listening to. Listen to it again. If you are or were afan of Mad Men, you’ll feel like youcould walk into the scene. There are sounds of menu pages being turned, subdueddialogue from different tables, dishes and silverware clanking on the plates, awaiter walking away after asking a question. You can hear footfalls andclothing rustle. It goes on. It’s a soundtrack. There are more sounds in it aswell. Many sound engineers add some distortion in their tracks to make thevoices more real. One caveat: Using music alone can be deadly to your learners.If you’re just using music as a background, it will take away from yourmessage.

The Firesign Theatre recording is a differentstory on so many levels. First, it’s not a soundtrack that was part of a video.It’s from a standalone album made in 1970. Yes, 1970. It’s analog audio takento an extreme. And it’s a true sonic environment. The story is told in a vividsonic manner—so vivid, you can visualize it if you close your eyes. Everysingle one of the sounds other than the voices was recorded separately; then, theywere spliced together with something that looked suspiciously like Scotch tapeand recorded again on a mix tape. It was a long, tedious, and laboriousprocess.

Today this is a different story. We can just recordor find the sounds we want to use, drop them on a timeline in a program likeAdobe Audition or Sound Forge (Sonyjust sold this to Magix), and put it all together and make an mp3. Whew! Things were a lot more difficultto accomplish back in the days of analog recording.

True enough, eLearning doesn’t need this muchsound. But it needs some. Sometimes you only need one or two environmentalsounds to make the soundtrack realistic enough to get learners believingthey’re in the situation you want them to believe in.

Two schools of sound

There seem to be two schools of sound in theeLearning industry.

The first school likes a clean announcerstyle with no other sounds, except an occasional effect that is loud andobvious. A trained announcer records the script in a sound booth or somewheresimilarly quiet, and that sound is played behind slides or video in the lesson.I encounter it frequently in eLearning. Too frequently. Does this kind of soundactually take away from the learning experience? I believe it does.

The second kind of soundtrack, which I’llcall “new school,” uses non-obviously-trained voices in natural environments.The new school adds ambient sounds, like the air around us, along withappropriate background sounds that bring the speaker or speakers and theirenvironment to life. This is a more realistic and immersive way to create sound,especially when we have to “build” slides because of the instructional design.

There’s a third way that is sort of in betweenthese approaches, and that would look like “clean” voice sound with a couple ofeffects thrown in because they seem appropriate. This hybrid can actually be theworst of all three. The listeners don’t believe they’re in an environment for ananosecond. The developers just spent time making something that actually madethe lesson worse than it was before. Why did they bother?

Reality isn’t just for reality TV

Today we live in an extended realityenvironment. That marvelous soundtrack from MadMen was accurate. The clanking of china and forks and knives on china werereal recorded sounds. The background dialogue was recorded for the scene. Twentyor even 10 years ago, we really weren’t “plugged in” to environmental sounds tothe extent we are today. We live in a rich sonic environment. We listen to allsorts of sounds without being aware they are there. A big difference today is thatwe can fairly easily create the environment we want with sound effects. Andanyone can do it easily, which makes me wonder why it’s not being done forevery eLearning session.

Soundtrack creation should be the standardrather than the exception. It takes hard thought and good execution to create areal soundtrack—or a surreal soundtrack, if your lesson calls for it (and somedo!). You have to think of everything that might be in the environment you’recreating as a writer and then find those sounds online or make them yourself. Thethought process is complex, and even though it doesn’t take all that long, it’snonetheless a process.

So why not take advantage of the soundtrack-buildingpotential available in any number of programs? These programs range in pricefrom freeware to thousands of dollars. Sound programs are really easy to use—infact, a whole lot easier than video editing and effects programs.

Making a script

I wish there were a way to just tell you howto write a script for voice and sonic environment, but this isn’t about thatnecessarily. One simple way is to write the words and then record your own voice;or, even simpler, just listen to yourself speaking the words you wrote. Do theysound natural? Are they a part of an ecosystem of words you hear when you’reactually talking to someone else? Do the two or more people having aconversation really sound like they’re having a conversation? In most cases,you’ll probably do tons of edits on the script. An easy way is to speak thedialogue with someone else. Does it really sound natural? Is it a conversationyou could be having with someone else that just happens to inform them with thelesson?

If you want to learn about script writing, Masterclass is offering a screenwriting class by Aaron Sorkin. It offers many other classes in the creative arts as well. I’mtaking a filmmaking class by Werner Herzog. The classes are $90, and while notreally in depth, there’s still (to me anyway) a lot of value in them for theprice.

If it seems like there are more questionsthan answers, there are. It’s something you need to be aware of as an eLearningdesigner and developer. You can’t just write up a lesson any more, record it,and hand it off to the Captivate or Storyline developer. You have to create anenvironment. That’s part of the evolving job of an eLearning designer anddeveloper. Welcome to Hollywood.