This was an interesting project of creating a voiceover for a video piece that was originally made to accompany another piece of audio. Not knowing that this would be the case, the visual piece that I created was very much its own entity that more or less worked on it its, separated from the original audio, tethered only loosely by a thematic link of someone potentially avoiding something that was alluded to in the observation which was the original audio.

So that brings me to this new exercise and I was originally annoyed at myself for having too many elements that worked with itself in my visual piece that I thought I didn’t leave any room for a voiceover or other sounds. My main issue with the last project was its messiness and lack of clarity due to its combination of too many pieces, from its visual image, story read in voiceover, and another, seperate story being shown through text on screen. So for this project I decided to try again, given the opportunity to strip away the original audio and develop a new voiceover, one I could form around the visual. I decided to stay with an element from the original project of having the visuals and voiceover informing a story through separated moments in time, which I thought worked well in forcing the audience to focus on the piece both with their eyes and their ears, something that I feel is lacking in a lot of content I consume nowadays.

I thought this project worked well in tying the two separated elements together, which I attempted to achieve through the narrative connection of phone communication. I really liked the idea of having two characters failing to communicate an important message to one another through different mediums, through missed calls and texts, and potential voicemails ultimately being deleted.

I originally planned on creating a small piece of music to accompany the project but after multiple efforts I ultimately couldn’t settle on a tone or style of music that improved the quality of the piece, as it often took away from the power of the voiceover, which I recorded multiple versions of and ended up picking the take which had a certain weariness, and somber tone that I thought was very effective.

This is a video piece I could definitely see as an opening to a larger video piece like a short film, as I thought it was an interesting an effective way to introduce several characters, their current emotional state and personality, and a central conflict that could fuel an entire narrative.