The Art of the Voiceover

I felt like my script required voiceover narration. I'm drawing additional inspiration from Matt D'Avella's YouTube videos because they usually tend to have voiceover narration. I find it strange that I am trying to take conventions from nonfiction videos and trying to fit them into a fiction piece, but I think it will work really well.

If there's one thing I hate, is when voiceover is essentially like the narrator in a book. I like when people have fun with narration. I recently watched two movies that had pretty creative narration techniques:

1. Ferris Bueller's Day Off

This movie always comes to mind when talking about breaking the fourth wall, and it works perfectly. It's playful and exposes the inner-workings of Ferris's mind. 

2. Y Tu Mamá También

This is one of the beautiful uses of voiceover narration I have ever seen. It caught me completely off guard the first time I saw the film because I was on my phone and everything fell silent for a split second before the narrator spoke. I thought my headphones had disconnected or that I was getting a phone call. It was pretty trippy and it serves as a way to keep the narrator away from the story being displayed. The narrator would talk about random stuff that did not actually narrate the scene but give more context to the characters, setting, and history. 

I want the voiceover narration to be pretty unique. I don't think I'll come up with something as groundbreaking as what Alfonso Cuarón did but I can try.

I was thinking about making the narrator himself a Minimalist. Saying the least amount of words he can to get his point across. That would be an interesting way to give it more personality, so instead of saying something like, 

"I got rid of everything I didn't need. I searched through hundreds of papers I never read and blah blah blah"

He will say, 

"No value. No point in keeping"

That was kind of a stupid example, but that's the direction I want to go in.