The Art of the Voiceover

Happy Sunday everyone! I am quite ecstatic today as one of my favorite artists released an album last night, and I have been bumping it ever since. But that is quite off-topic and I will introduce you to what I will be discussing today, which is the voice-over. My group and I all found that one thing we all agreed on was that we felt that a voice-over is a great way to open a film. However, we cannot allow our voice-over to be interpreted as a lazy decision, so I called it upon myself to do research on the art of the voice-over and how to be a great storyteller through the use of the sound. Something that I have learned about audiences is that while you must spoon-feed some information, the director must attempt to make the audience work a little bit to understand the scene in its entirety. This is something that I learned in my AICE Media Studies class after we watched a TEDTalk on the art of storytelling.

I spent my morning watching a plethora of films with the voice-over in order to see what exactly these voice-overs are attempting to do for the audience, and exactly how effective they were on me. I realized that voice-overs are seen as lazy and somewhat annoying when the voice-over is just describing what is appearing on-screen. Voice-overs are very effective; however, when the audience is receiving information that they would not be able to understand through the on-screen action. Voice-overs also allow the audience to get introduced to the character very quickly and allow the film to incorporate many different twists on their films such as humor, irony, and more. One of my favorite uses of the voice-over was in the film Goodfellas. In the film, the protagonist is the narrator of the film and gives a sincere and active insight of what is going on in the scenes, and allows the audience to grow attachment to the character. This is also shown in the film Trainspotting. In this film, the main character is a heroin addict who is trying to quit, but the film shows the character's friends and lifestyle get in the way of his goal to stop. The use of the character's voice-over gives the audience an insight on the mindset of the main character and allows the audience to be empathetic about the character's poor decisions as the audience knows about his good intentions. The voice-over can provide the audience with just the right amount of information that my group wants to accomplish in the film opening, so we decided we will do our best to perfect the voice-over.

We decided that we will also try to stick to some of the normal conventions of the drama, comedy, and romance genres. Our film opening, while using the voice-over, will focus on natural lighting to give a realistic look on the scenes. We will also incorporate low and high angles to describe the power of the characters and how the audience should interpret these characters. The opening will also use close-ups as the genre focuses on emotions and the characters' reactions to how the scenes and actions progress. These will help the film give the most realistic image to the audience, which is what our film will attempt to do. With the combination of all of these elements of film, I believe that our opening will be great as we will get our character's personality across while leaving the audience wanting more and wondering why the protagonist is the way he has become.

The next time I blog I will be incredibly excited to see you all and allow you all to see our storyboard. I cannot wait to start the filming process with you all and see something that my group and I created in our heads come to life. Thank you for reading!!!!

Resources:

Durie, Alexander. "25 Great Movies With The Most Effective Uses Of Voice-Over Narration."Taste of Cinema - Movie Reviews and Classic Movie Lists. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Mar. 2017.

Cooper, Matthew. "Codes and Conventions of Drama." SlideShare. N.p., 04 Dec. 2012. Web. 19 Mar. 2017.