Voice-Over

A young woman Lindsay deals with her dying mother, her estranged sister Marie, and her complicated feelings towards her best friend John.

Creative team

Writer/director/producer: Eric Warwaruk

Director’s statement

Eric Warwaruk says:

“Voice-Over is a movie I set out deliberately to be an experiment.

The initial conception for the project was very much an experimental film, something about two sisters and their unresolved conflict with their off-screen mother and how their two personalities were influenced by their bad relationship with their mother.

The two sisters were completely different.

One was very repressed and didn’t say much, the other one was very imaginative and spirited and was always talking a mile a minute in her head. Basically, I wanted to explore exteriority versus interiority, embodied by Lindsay for the former and Marie for the latter.

However, due to unforeseen complications (ha!), I could only get time to film the actress playing Lindsay. Her voice-over lines were actually written and recorded after filming was done and it was a gamble to see if it would actually work with the scenes I shot.

Once I laid the voice-over tracks in, they gave such an interesting and richer layer to Lindsay’s character than was initially conceived in my first script.

The idea of using voice over itself is fascinating to me mostly because when I was in film school voice over was looked upon as something cliche and a device that only the most saccharine directors utilized. As soon as I heard that, I knew I wanted to prove these people wrong and show there are no rules for creativity.

The particular allure of voice over for me is that it seems to be such a direct way into a person’s mind, into his or her soul. Being the kind of writer I am, with a fixation on trying to know and explore what other people are like and what their motivations are, voice over is a mine worth spelunking.”

About Eric Warwaruk

Eric is a filmmaker based in Winnipeg. He grew up on a family farm three hours northwest of Winnipeg that had only three channels on the TV and no VCR. He instead sublimated his love for films into writing, and would regularly read the descriptions of movies he would never see in the weekly TV guide.

Later when enrolled in the film studies program at the University of Manitoba, he would recognize those same classic movies in the weekly screenings for his courses.

Eric’s goals for the near future are to get his TV show projects off the ground; to do sequels to Voice-Over focusing on the characters of Terry and Marie; and to work on a series of videos of what he calls “muzicpoems,” basically welding video imagery, music and poetry into one deadly punch.