Sound Journal

What role does sound play?

Sound plays a vital role in my documentary, as the strength of
the narrative rests on the voiceover. Unlike a short film where
the messages that director wants to portray can be shown
through the visuals, a documentary requires spoken words in
the form of narration via voiceover and the opinions expressed
by different individual interviewees.
What does the role involve?
Being in charge of sound came with a lot of responsibility, due
to the fact that the production would not make sense if the
sound did not correlate or compliment the narrative. Alongside
the role of director I had to create the voice over script
collecting factual information on the topic of my documentary,
which was cyber bullying. Additionally, after careful
consideration I decided that there would be no use for score
music as it would just distract the audience from the narration
and they would lose interest in the topic and focus more on the
background, non diegetic sound. As the voiceover was one of
the key elements of the documentary I had to find a suitable
voice actor, one that had an authoritative voice as the subject I
was talking about was of serious concern to society as a whole.
Did I encounter any problems whilst completing this role?
On a whole the running of the sound was smooth, and I had
only ran into a few minor issues that were easy to resolve. One
of the issues was finding the correct voice to do the narration
after careful casting I had found the correct voice as they
sounded authoritative, however did not sound to serious, as if
this was the case the audience would just feel manipulated into
believing everything that was said in the documentary, whilst
my purpose was to educate and inform and not shape the
viewers opinions. Another small issue that I had encountered
was during the filming of interviews, after several takes I had
realised that the sound was not coming out clear and there was

a lot of noise coming from the surroundings of the location,

later I had come to the conclusion that the 'Rode Microphone'
was not on, this was simply resolved by turning the microphone
on, after this there were no more issues with the sound and the
production then ran smoothly.
What has the role of soundperson taught me?
Taking on the role of soundperson had taught me that the
sound ha to be clear and concise to help the audience
understand the narrative especially within a documentary. I
quickly came to the conclusion that recording sound is very
time consuming as the voice actor will have to have many
takes for them to get it right, and improvising the script would
not sound as professional. Overall the main lesson that I had
learned whilst partaking this role was that the role of
soundperson is closely related to all other roles that I had
undertaken during this production such as: director, editor and
cinematographer as all these aspects would not flow if the
sound is not correct.