Voiceover recording and production - Webstream PR
All narrative mediums: literature, theater, song, television, film, etc. rely on a “narrator” or “narrative agency” to convey the narrative’s story. This narrator can take many forms; in film it can describe both the camera and soundtrack itself as well as the overt narration of a voiceover recording. The voiceover recording is the easiest form of narrative agency to find and describe in film, in part because it is usually distinctly separate from the film frame. Not all off camera sound is narration, but the narrator is most often depicted as a nondiegetic sound or sound that does to emanate from objects inside the film frame.
The voiceover recording track usually occurs during the beginning and ending of a film, but it can also occur anywhere within the film. Often the diegetic sound quiets and the voice-over becomes the predominant track. This separation of diegetic sound and voice-over reveals the connection between film’s voice-over narrator and the narrator found in written texts.
Like all parts of film, film narration borrows heavily from textual narratives (such as short stories and novels) as well as theatrical narratives. Many films that have been adapted from plays or novels choose to retain some of the original voiceover recording narration, especially when the narration creates a voice of its own. The narration can also reveal the inner thoughts of major or minor characters. Sometimes these inner thoughts reveal ideas of issues that wouldn’t be apparent without the voice-over. In many ways narration allows the viewer to have more information than even the main characters depicted in the story. To understand the functions of voice-over narration in film it is important to see its place in the overall structure or lack thereof, of narrative in general. The function as well as the form is influence by greater issues of narrative that encompass all types of narrative media.
While there is much disagreement about the terminology used to describe narratives and their forms, there is agreement, in that a narrative ‘tells a story.’ Mieke Bal, a narratologist, or structuralist narrative theorist, describes the narrative text through the manner of its telling. “A narrative text is a text in which an agent relates (‘tells’) a story in a particular medium, such as language, imagery, sound, buildings, or a combination thereof.” (Bal 5) Bal notes that this narrating agent can be almost anything- from paintings to comics; most media have been used to express stories. The agent is who/what supplies the narration; who/what conveys the story is most simply described as the narrator. The narrator can be classified, if only contentiously, as first-, second-, and third-person. As Steven Cohan and Linda M Shires note in their analysis of narrative fiction, this distinction is largely linguistic. “Traditional criticism tries to keep agent and agency separate classifying narrators through linguistic designation: first- or third-person pronouns.” (Cohen and Shires 90) These divisions help to situate the narrator relative to the story being told, and thus allow for greater analysis of the narrative structure.
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