![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Fire and Fury (audio book)
I'm listening to this audiobook excerpt right now about the Trump Presidency, and yes, Everything Is Terrible, but that's not the reason why it's on my laptop, tbh.
It's the narrator's voice that I'm actually interested in, (Holter Graham) and how he goes about his craft.
Holter Graham's pace is fluid and fluent, and he doesn't rush.
His diction is clear, and you can tell the difference when he goes from the third person narrative to actual spoken dialogue. e.g. 'Melania Trump didn't want Donald Trump to run for President, and he tried to mollify her. "Don't put the cart before the horse," her husband said'. You can actually hear the speech in quotations in one tone of voice and the narrative in a different way. It's really quite brilliant.
It does help that writer (Wolff) knows how to write a potboiler, but Graham is really performing the heck of the material. When he reads Ivanka's voice, he gets the pseudo baby coquette voice that she has. For Trump, he gets the idea of his braggadocious and wheeling tones without sounding anything like him.
There are some parts of the audiobook where he has to read an excerpt of Trump's speech, and he does so with the manic conviction that Trump has, with again, an impression of him, but not him.
Absolutely brilliant.
You can also even hear the 'punctuation marks' in his voice if that makes sense? Not just exclamation and question marks, but ranging from the mini pause of the comas, to the longer pauses of semicolons and colons. He truly gets the notion of a good audio being the 'Theatre of the mind' when done well.
A few podficcers I have listened to have come very close to this standard, to be fair. But it's good to hear the professional level for an audio reader, and Graham has been in the game for a long time.
It's the narrator's voice that I'm actually interested in, (Holter Graham) and how he goes about his craft.
Holter Graham's pace is fluid and fluent, and he doesn't rush.
His diction is clear, and you can tell the difference when he goes from the third person narrative to actual spoken dialogue. e.g. 'Melania Trump didn't want Donald Trump to run for President, and he tried to mollify her. "Don't put the cart before the horse," her husband said'. You can actually hear the speech in quotations in one tone of voice and the narrative in a different way. It's really quite brilliant.
It does help that writer (Wolff) knows how to write a potboiler, but Graham is really performing the heck of the material. When he reads Ivanka's voice, he gets the pseudo baby coquette voice that she has. For Trump, he gets the idea of his braggadocious and wheeling tones without sounding anything like him.
There are some parts of the audiobook where he has to read an excerpt of Trump's speech, and he does so with the manic conviction that Trump has, with again, an impression of him, but not him.
Absolutely brilliant.
You can also even hear the 'punctuation marks' in his voice if that makes sense? Not just exclamation and question marks, but ranging from the mini pause of the comas, to the longer pauses of semicolons and colons. He truly gets the notion of a good audio being the 'Theatre of the mind' when done well.
A few podficcers I have listened to have come very close to this standard, to be fair. But it's good to hear the professional level for an audio reader, and Graham has been in the game for a long time.
no subject
Now, I'm never going to be confidently good at things like accents and distinct character voices, especially not in the way of professional readers, but I always appreciate the craft of reading a book aloud and it's interesting to think on the way different people do things.
This is interesting for me. I do think the slipping from narration to character voice is difficult, although there are a few podficcers I know who are extremely good at it. I'm working on being more conscious of the differentiations.
Cheers for this.
it helps Graham was an actor
He softens voices when it comes to women, but even then he gets the flinty brazenness of Conway, and the tight unhinged nature of Ann Coulter. For Melania Trump, he tries to go to that strange non accented English Western Europeans have, although her accent is distinctly Eastern European, but it's the idea that she isn't American that comes across than getting her to sound Eastern European, you know? It's how he implies her foreignness without saying so.
I do think the slipping from narration to character voice is difficult
Oh yeah, same. For the sake of my German pronunciation, I've been recording myself reading a page once every two days. It's a child's book, so there's the line of narrative voice, and then dialogue.
As in, "No, I do not wish to go to bed", Millie wailed, stomping her feet. I find myself saying everything in the same, flat voice of narrative, so I've been working on that. Going from neutral narrative to the sharper mood of the dialogue. It really is difficult.
No worries! I think this process of podficcing has helped me with my writing, in that I'm trying to shave off dialogue tags, and make the transitions from neutral narrative to dialogue.