Senior Digital Media Specialist
Examples
Context
Similar to writing a paper, starting your media project by doing research on the work that is already out there can help bring inspiration to your project while also asking you to consider how your work fits into the media landscape and what is distinct about your particular perspective on the topic. Below are some films and texts that can help set the stage for thinking about language, dubbing, voice and translation through media.
Films
Sorry to bother you by
Call Number: PN1997.2 .S6747 2018Publication Date: 2018"In an alternate present-day version of Oakland, telemarketer Cassius Green discovers a magical key to professional success, propelling him into a universe of greed."
Singin' in the Rain by Call Number: PN1997 .S57453 2002ISBN: 0790765195Publication Date: 1952When the transition is being made from silent films to `talkies', everyone has trouble adapting. Don and Lina have been cast repeatedly as a romantic couple, but when their latest film is remade into a musical, only Don has the voice for the new singing part. After a lot of practise with a diction coach, Lina still sounds terrible, and Kathy, a bright young aspiring actress, is hired to record over her voice.
Singin' in the Rain addresses dubbing of voices directly within the text of the film but there are countless examples that have less transparent dubbing such as West Side Story and Carmen Jones.
- Excerpt from Sorry to Bother you by Boots Riley
Excerpt of telemarketing office scene from Sorry to Bother you by Boots Riley - Excerpt from Singing in the Rain by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
Lip sync performance from Singing in the Rain. - Excerpt from Halimuhfack by Chris Harris
"A performer lip-synchs to archival audio featuring the voice of author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston as she describes her method of documenting African American folk songs in Florida. " - Video Data Bank - wawa - Sky Hopinka
"Featuring speakers of chinuk wawa, an Indigenous language from the Pacific Northwest, Wawa begins slowly, patterning various forms of documentary and ethnography. Quickly, the patterns tangle and become confused and commingled, while translating and transmuting ideas of cultural identity, language, and history." - Covers - Adie Russell"These videos are part of an ongoing project where I lipsynch found audio...The exchange between these moments exists as a composite of past and present, a kind of third space where meanings shift, judgements waver, visual cues are displaced, and the language hovers, unattached to the identity of the original speaker, and yet not quite able to attach to my identity, my image, my mouth, my gestures."
- Pressures of the Text - Peter Rose
"Integrates direct address, invented languages, ideographic subtitles, sign language, and simultaneous translation to investigate the feel and form of sense, the shifting boundaries between meaning and meaninglessness..."
Podcast
- Interview on The Sonic Color Line by Jennifer Lynn Stoever
"...We tend to think of race and racism as visual phenomena, but Stoever challenges white listeners to examine how racism can infect our ears, altering the sound of the world and other people. We discuss the history of American prejudicial listening since slavery and learn how African American writers and musicians have pushed back against this invisible “sonic color line..."
Text
Vocal Projections by Call Number: PN1995.9.D6 V63 2019ISBN: 9781501331251Publication Date: 2018-10-18Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary examines a previously neglected topic in the field of documentary studies: the political, aesthetic, and affective functions that voices assume. On topics ranging from the celebrity voice over to ventriloquism, from rockumentary screams to feminist vocal politics, these essays demonstrate myriad ways in which voices make documentary meaning beyond their expository, evidentiary and authenticating functions. The international range of contributors offers an innovative approach to the issues relating to voices in documentary.
The Sonic Color Line by ISBN: 9781479890439Publication Date: 2016-11-15The unheard history of how race and racism are constructed from sound and maintained through the listening ear. Race is a visual phenomenon, the ability to see "difference." At least that is what conventional wisdom has lead us to believe. Yet, The Sonic Color Line argues that American ideologies of white supremacy are just as dependent on what we hear--voices, musical taste, volume--as they are on skin color or hair texture. Reinforcing compelling new ideas about the relationship between race and sound with meticulous historical research, Jennifer Lynn Stoever helps us to better understand how sound and listening not only register the racial politics of our world, but actively produce them...
