The idea behind my new soundscript is to sap the manly, warrior voice of the narrator and replace it with a weaker, objective male voice. This will maintain the gender of the narrator, but the change in tone and word choice should drastically affect the audience’s mood. The narrator in my new soundscript will be a historian introducing the legend of Leonidas from an objective viewpoint. I will be providing the voice of the narrator, and I will try to keep my voice as steady and emotionless as possible. My clip starts with the fight between young Leonidas and the wolf, so I might start with something like “Spartan legend holds that King Leonidas defeated a giant wolf before returning to Sparta during his trials of manhood. Here we see young Leonidas engaged in combat with the wolf. Notice how he uses the terrain to gain advantage over a superior foe, much like he does later at the Battle of Thermopylae.” While the visuals remain the same, this soundscript will turn an epic war movie into a sort of documentary, weakening its emotional hold on the audience.

My research question that I developed in my Response 1.4 is “How does the narrators’ male warrior tone of voice and word choice affect the audience’s mood during the clip?”

My primary claim that I will seek to support in Major Paper 1 is that the narrator’s strong warrior tone is critical to the momentum and intensity of the movie clip by creating a relationship of awe and wonder with the audience. This claim is reasonable because 300 is an extremely manly war movie, so the presence of a male warrior narrator naturally enhances the mood. The claim also has risk attached to it because, as my new soundscript should illustrate, the narration carries the mood of the audience rather than the visuals. Showing that a change of tone from strong male to weak male drains the visuals of their effect would be dramatic indeed.

The significance behind my research question and claim is that my Major Paper 1 should offer insights into the effects a commanding male voice has on the listener, and even offer commentary on the male-dominated dynamics of action-movies, war, and society in general. Analyzing how a commanding male voice affects listeners will be useful for the final project in which we make an audio narrative presentation about service learning at the Boys and Girls’ Club.

The artifact I intend to use is Kozloff’s piece about voice-over narration. As Sohroosh mentioned in his blog entry, my new soundscript will do plenty of “telling” so using Kozloff’s piece will be very useful.

The only question I have now is how I can stretch one claim into a full length paper, or whether I should include multiple claims.

My first question after reading “The Problem of Speaking For Others” is whether Alcoff becomes a hypocrite by perhaps speaking for other social theorists that may not agree with her. She writes an essay on the problem of speaking for others, yet often refers to “we” as if all social theorists agree with her. I also find myself overwhelmed with her references to philosophers such as Foucault and Hegel that I vaguely remember learning about in 8th grade. Honestly, I believe the majority of Alcoff’s article is too dense and references too many outside texts to be accessible to me. I understand the basic gist of the essay and how it applies to our service learning, though. We will eventually have to compose a project where we speak for others; we will be speaking for the poverty-stricken youth of the Boys and Girls club of North Seattle. By Alcoff’s logic, our claims will be invalidated by the fact that most of us are affluent middle-class college students, not accustomed to living in poverty. Alcoff says, “I agree, then, that we should strive to create wherever possible the conditions for dialogue and the practice of speaking with and to rather than speaking for others.” We can take this advice into our project, by talking with the kids and learning about their lives rather than just speaking for them and making assumptions.

The quote I chose is from Illich’s “To Hell With Good Intentions.” It appears on page 318 as Illich is talking about how middle-class volunteers can do little to help a Mexican village. Illich says, “At worst, in your “community development” spirit you might create just enough problems to get someone shot.” This reference to community development evokes ideas of building homes and digging wells, the kind of physical labor that our definition of service (to perform routine maintenance or repair) embodies…

For our PSA about getting homeless people homes, our narrator would be a young homeless male with a slightly grizzled voice, somewhere between 25 and 30 years of age. He wouldn’t be part of the scene. His basic message would be a first-hand account of the terrible living conditions of living underground next to the tunnel and appeal to the listener’s ethos. The narrator would be speaking in every scene with emphasis on talking during scenes where pictures of the ghetto underground living space are shown. Some example content of the narrator would be like “Look at us, we are living underground… this isn’t by choice, man, … we have nowhere else to go.” Because he is talking from a personal standpoint as a homeless man, his language would be lay-person but not vulgar. He would speak passionately from personal experience. Our audience would be citizens of the city who don’t live underground, citizens who are listening comfortably from their homes. Ideologically it should inspire the listener to get involved and try to save these homeless people.

1. The first audio clip was a fun-loving movie about a man becoming the foster father of a child. The voice-over narration tells us that the father is a struggling writer as well. The second clip has no voice narration, only some eerie music possibly fitting a horror or sci-fi movie.

2.  The keynote sound for the first audio clip was the cheery background music that set the fundamental tone of a family feel-good movie. The signal sound of the first clip was the cymbals and bells and whistles that went off occasionally to describe the setting as possibly the father’s home or workshop. The soundmark was Bug’s Bunny’s “What’s up Doc?” catchphrase, which pegged the movie as a family movie for kids.  The second clip’s keynote sound was the eerie techno music that set the mood for a horror or sci-fi movie. The signal sound was the repetitive beeping that added to the eerie quality of the clip. There was no definitive soundmark because it was the same music over and over again.

3. The first clip is family film, the second is a horror or sci-fi movie.

    Sarah Kozloff’s Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film begins by juxtaposing cinematic storytelling with oral storytelling to introduce voice-over narration as a combination of the two: the ancient oral style superimposed on the cinematic story. She calls narrated films “hybrids” and even though she calls them “half-retrograde, half-pathbreaking, and half dissembling,” she clearly supports voice-over narration as a “fascinating dance between pose and actuality.” Kozloff goes to great lengths to define voice-over narration, formally defining it as “oral statements, conveying any portion of a narrative, spoken by an unseen speaker…” Kozloff then concedes that there are different types of voice-over narrators such as “authorial” and “character” narrators. Towards the end of the introduction, Kozloff clarifies the purpose of her work: “for my readers to hear such films with my ears.”

    Kozloff’s other text, she begins with the claim that “voice-over narration remains an integral part of moviemaking—so common that we often overlook its contribution and ignore its development.”She then presents her definition of voice-over narration much like she did in Invisible Storytellers. Kozloff then proceeds to outline the history of voice-over narration from its first appearance in 1933’s The Power and the Glory to voice-over in modern films such as Fight Club. This long history of voice-over narration begs the question that Kozloff then asks: “So why are we still debating the legitimacy of voice-over?” Kozloff then provides some of the reasons why film aficionados don’t like voice-over narration, primarily that film is unique as a storytelling device because of its ability to convey a story nonverbally. Kozloff cites film theorists such as  Jeffrey Youdelman and Bill Nichols to support her warrant that “in many circumstances narration is a more forthright, honest approach to the subject matter than pretending that the represented scenes speak for themselves or that editing is noncoercive.” Kozloff then counters the film aficionados’ critiques by offering several reasons why voice-over narration is an important and artful component of film, such as that “when [voice-over narration] is well-executed, it opens up inimitable avenues for filmmakers.” Kozloff substantiates her argument with many concrete examples from well-known films such as Apocalypse Now and Seabiscuit.

     After reading Kozloff’s texts, I have learned that one objection that many people raise against voice-over narration is that it negates film’s unique ability to convey a story nonverbally in a way that theatre and other storytelling mediums cannot. I think that Kozloff feels she must defend voice-over narration because few people rise to defend it against the many criticisms it receives and that voice-over narration serves its purposes well and efficiently conveys important information to the viewer. I find Kozloff’s texts easy to understand because I am very familiar with voice-over narration such as in A Christmas Story, War of the Worlds, March of the Penguins, Arrested Development, Seabiscuit, Fight Club, and 300. I support Kozloff’s arguments because I believe these films would not have been as powerful without the voice-over narration. I am considering analyzing the use of voice-over narration in the film 300.