Voiceover Text:

The life of plants is simple but mystical. They gain energy from sunshine and rain, and then feed the animals. Even the smallest life, such as weeds, grow with effort, providing a favourable living environment for birds. In this large kingdom, oak is the representative of stubborn vitality. A breeze blew over the botanic garden. The autumn is coming. The oak tree sensitively feels the change, and starts to prepare for the cold weather. The chemical message is sent from branches to the body, urging the break down of chlorophyll in the leaves. This change is amazing. Numbers of red leaves are like flaming fireballs, glinting in the sunlight. Some of them start to fall, they have finished their work and sacrifice to conserve more energy for the tree. 

 

Reflection:

The whole exercise around our observational writing is a gradual process. It starts from only words of Jackson’s observation, then turns to my visual content and finally ends with a completely different description. The final piece I write may have very little connection with the original observation, which indicates the significance of interpretation. This piece changes from being objective to subjective, adding my own ideas step by step.

My idea of this rewriting voiceover came from the filming experience. As I mentioned in the previous post, Jackson’s observation is mainly related to the natural world — the snake, plants and birds. Although I was not able to film the snake, I did all the clips in the Botanic Garden to show similar scenery. When edited that piece, I found it seemed like a nature documentary film. So, why don’t I just make it a real nature documentary with the voiceover? The documentary film I pictured in my brain is more to the educational kind that the narrator will lead audiences to discover something. Thus, I chose to focus on one thing which would be the oak. 

To achieve the scientific and educational feeling, more researches need to be done for the plant. As the beautiful red oak leaves were captured by the camera, I set the theme to explain this colour change. After reading and watching the related knowledge, I came up with the final written piece. This procedure proves that voiceover is both creative and factual. The description is still straightforward, talking about what is on the screen, but the form of words is creative which differs the piece from its origin. 

Moving to the recording step, I considered having a male voice because most people including myself would expect David Attenborough’s voice as the narrator of documentary film. Because I had demonstrated my idea to Matt when we did the group work, he became the ‘David Attenborough’ to read the piece. For the editing, I just simply adjusted the duration and very slightly changed the order to emphasis on the oak. In conclusion, this individual exercise offers an opportunity to discover the complicated relationship between text and image. Personally, it reminds me of Montage. They have one simple common point: the same shot combines with other shots will produce different meaning; the same text combines with other images will also produce different meaning (and vice versa).