The Comeback of Spoken Narration

I recently spoke at an event in San Francisco aimed at getting documentary filmmakers to “Think Outside the Doc Box”. I invited the audience members to consider common documentary conventions, such as narration, and ask themselves, “How could I turn this convention on its head?”.

Spoken narration has fallen out of favor in the last decade or so because filmmakers are loathe to invoke the so-called “voice of God”, an omniscient, authoritative male voice of exposition. This traditional convention has largely been replaced by title cards to deliver necessary information.

However, I predict that spoken narration will make a comeback, partly because narration is so who effective at conveying what we need to know to understand the story, and partly because we as human beings love to hear the human voice.

So what will this new spoken narration look like? Prompting my listeners to think outside the box, I asked, what if your narration was delivered in a child’s voice? Or, what if your narrator was a famous politician rather than a famous actor? And what if the politician was a conservative right-wing Republican and your documentary’s POV was left-leaning?

What if your narration were song? What if it was animated text? Graffiti?

I’m working with a director now, Tiffany Schlain on her film “Connected,” and we are experimenting with narration. As part of this film is a personal documentary, Tiffany’s own voice will be used to narrate her story. Alongside that, she is developing another narrator, a female BBC-sounding commentator. This voice is a humorous spoof on the “voice of God” narrator. And we are experimenting with the two voices of narration interacting over time. I’m very curious to see what we come up with!

Here are some more ideas to spark your own thinking: what if you could see your narrator in the sound booth recording the narration, making mistakes, emphasizing different words? How would that change your experience of the narration as a viewer? Or what if the narrator were alive at the screening of the documentary, speaking into a microphone? As bizarre as this may sound, I recently saw Sam Green narrates his own film at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, “Utopia In Four Movements”. The results were extremely entertaining, especially when Sam stumbled or interacted with the audience. This “live” documentary is a wonderful innovation on the documentary convention itself.

For more information about how to think outside the doc box, please check out my website. We are developing an “Innovation Worksheet” which will be available in my book, “Documentary Editing”.

Go to https://newdocediting.com/products/documentary_editing_ebook/.