The tool actors neglect most, and the specific things a voice class fixes: pitch, tension, projection, placement and the accent you already have at home.
12 Things Actors Should Know About Working on Their Voice
Drawn from what is actually said on camera, so you can decide whether to
spend the 12:44 watching it.
Nobody is going to subtitle you
If they hire you and cannot make out what you are saying, the fix is not post-production, it is a different actor. Clear diction is the floor of the job, below every artistic consideration, and it is the first thing a voice class addresses.
A note she gives constantly, and more often to women. Most people sit higher than they need to, especially under nerves. Pitch is not fixed, it is a control, and moving it down changes the authority of everything you say.
Nerves and stress make actors tighten, and a tight throat both sounds bad and does real damage to the cords. It comes up most in anger scenes, where actors constrict because that is what they do in life. However true that is, nobody wants to watch it for long.
People who have it usually do not know, because everyone around them has it too. That is how accents and habits are acquired in the first place. The fix is learning to lift the palate and get the sound resonating rather than rattling at the bottom.
The craft is largely the same across the two. The technical differences are real, and voice is the biggest of them. On stage without a mic you cannot whisper to a scene partner. On camera you cannot shout into a face at close range without creating a lie.
It feels like the gentle option and it is the opposite. Most doctors and voice experts will tell you whispering is harder on damaged cords than speaking. When a voice needs rest, the instruction is silence.
Foreign born students regularly arrive wanting to lose theirs. Her answer is no. Keep it, and acquire a second one that is easier to follow or comes from a different region. That is range added rather than range traded away.
Actors get up in class and mispronounce words that are not obscure. It happens and it is fixable in thirty seconds. If a word is giving you trouble, look it up or ask somebody, because doing that in an audition costs a great deal more.
There is no point practicing the ones that come easily. Strange strategic statistics is the one her students hate, which is exactly why it is the one worth running. Pick the sounds your own mouth resists.
Standard American for almost everyone, then perhaps a Southern, a New York, and English in both received pronunciation and something more working class. If you read as coming from somewhere, learn where your family came from, and work on it with the relative who sounds like it.
The useful question is not what an accent sounds like but where it lives: forward in the mouth, or back in the throat. She researched a Savannah accent for a series by meeting someone who had it, then took her sounds, sped them up and made them younger.
Voice over, commercial and animation are named as genuinely lucrative for actors who have built the instrument. None of it arrives by osmosis. Control over your own voice is something you go and acquire, deliberately, in a class.
Strange strategic statistics. Strange strategic statistics. If you have been in one of my technique classes, you might recognize one of everybody's least favorite tongue twisters. Strange strategic statistics. Working on your voice is crucial as an actor. And so many actors neglect working on their voice. First, just being understood being able to have clear diction. If they're hiring you and they can't understand what you're saying, they're not going to subtitle you. They're going to hire an actor who has worked on their voice. We offer voice classes at the studio quite regularly. We have two wonderful teachers that I highly recommend. Susan Wilder is one of them and she's very good with working on accent reduction and adopting an accent.
And Dan O' Callahan is fantastic at using your voice and also using it for singing. But having a good singing voice, you don't necessarily have to be a singer. Having that vocal control, being able to get through long line lines of dialogue, so working on your voice is so important. It's a tool. It's another one of your tools. I'm often asking actors to drop their pitch. They're up here quite a bit, especially for women. No, I need you down here. It's a tool. It can indicate so many different actions and tonalities. So don't neglect your voice. Vocal work is often very important for non-acctors as well.
If you are in a profession where you need to speak regularly or even occasionally to a group of people, working on your voice is a fantastic skill to have. Having a pleasant sounding voice, being understood, breath work. It's another fantastic thing that a good voice teacher will help you with, being able to be understood clearly. And then again, the versatility of being able to add accents, reduce accents. A lot of times I get foreignb born students who say, "Oh, I'm trying to lose my accent." And I said, "No, no, no. Keep it, but adopt another one. Adopt one that maybe is a little clearer to understand or from a different region, a different dialect." There's wonderful websites to help with all of that, too. But getting in or at least taking a couple of voice classes, so important. Learning how to pronounce certain words. I can't tell you. I'll have students that will get up in class and they'll perform something and they'll mispronounce what I thought but clearly wasn't a common word. It's okay.
But do some research, look up, see how it's pronounced. If you're having difficulty, have somebody help you with it. Another note that I give quite often in class is to relax. to relax the voice. Acting sometimes, especially if we're a beginner or we're really nervous, gets very stressful and we tend to tighten up and that can hurt and damage our vocal cords. So, being able to stay relaxed to not have this tension. A lot of times I'll have somebody doing a scene where they are getting angry and they're like this and they're arguing and they're doing this and I said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. You can't do that." And I don't care if that's what you really do in when you get into a fight because you're so unaccustomed to it that you get all of this tension, but nobody's going to want to watch that for a whole long time, right? People who have uh the vocal fry, right? It's as an annoying character for just a little bit on something. Okay. But to listen to it regularly, no, you have to be able to learn how to elevate your pallet and get that sound resonating so that you're not sounding like this.
Uh, it is fun to do every once in a while, but it's only to make fun. You know, quite often people will ask me, "What is the difference between film and television, screen acting, and theater acting? And the difference isn't huge. The acting process and craft are quite often the same. It's some of the technical things that are the difference. And the voice is one. If you're doing a a show, a theater show, your voice needs to project to the back of the theater. Quite often in big productions, you're miked, which is helpful, but if you're not, you can't whisper to somebody on stage. You've got to be able to project your voice out. A good voice class will help you be able to do that. For film, television, screen acting, I like to say you want to bring the people in, right? pushing it out for theater, bringing them in for film and television.
So, if you're in a scene where it's an intimate scene, you can't be this close to somebody and be shouting at their face. A lie is being created. So to be able to speak softly and articulately and be understood. A lot of times if there's been some damage to your voice, they don't want you to speak at all, much less whisper. A lot of people think that that's a good way to give their voice a rest. But most doctors and experts will tell you not to whisper. words can be very damaging on the vocal cords. Our voice is the tool that I think quite often in acting nowadays gets overlooked and people don't take the time to work on their voice. There is nothing like hearing uh a recognizable branded voice. You could get voice work. You can get commercial work, cartoon work it, which very lucrative by the way if you were able to use this tool. Staying relaxed, not damaging your voice, not screeching, right?
You want to be able to stay, it's always about relaxation of your throat, your voice to be able to use it. I won't do it right now, but to be able to use your voice loudly and still be understood. Quite often people get I mean and I'm like, "Oh, I can't I can't hear you at all." Or even yelling. So, it's it's something you need and you can learn how to control. It's going to take some work. This none of this stuff happens by accident or uh by osmosis. If you want to have control over your voice, it is something you need to work on. You can practice your tongue twisters. I tell my students, you don't have to practice a tongue twisters that don't give you any difficulty in the beginning. Quite often when you're working on accent or accent reduction or adopting an another dialect, you might it might feel like you're doing too much. That's in the beginning. Of course, it will until you start to feel comfortable with it.
You probably if you have a regional dialect, you probably you might not even notice it because you're surrounded. A lot of times people with vocal fry don't know that they have it because they're surrounded by people who sound like that. That's how we get to sound like that. Right? If we've got a southern accent, it's because we were surrounded by other people who were talking like this. And it just became the most natural thing in the whole world. My mother was from Louisiana, so I a southern accent's always been pretty easy for me. But when I was working on the television show Savannah, I wanted to hear what a Savannah accent sounded like, how different it was from Louisiana or any of the other regional areas. Doesn't have to get perfect down to the neighborhood, but I wanted to hear it. I wanted to do the work as best I could. So, I remember meeting a woman at a country club, but she spoke so slowly. I thought, well, I'm never going to be able to shoot a television series speaking this slowly.
So, I was able to take her sounds, speed them up. Also, she was quite a bit older than I was, make them, you know, a little more youthful. I just I want you to be thinking of your voice as this other wonderful miraculous tool that you can use to change and adapt and create your characters. Make yourself more versatile. Make have it it's fun, right? Those actors who are so good at accents and dialects, we love that. Being an actor is fun and one of those things is working on your voice. I love listening to people's voices and accents. Of course, I'm not going to work on an accent. That's not going to work for me. That's ridiculous. But there might be ones that do.
I think almost everybody should of course have a standard American. Maybe a southern, maybe a New York, maybe uh an English accent. both RP and maybe more working class. If you look like you might come from another country, maybe it's the country that your parents came from. Do they sound like that? I quite often will find somebody who they they say, "Oh, I got I've got this accent I need to work on." And then they'll turn to me and they'll go, "But this is exactly how my dad sounds." Great. Work on it with him. listen to him be copying those those inflections and intonation and paying attention. I love paying attention to where the sound comes from from certain accents and dialects or where it resonates for certain people. If you're somebody who likes to do impersonations, which is not the same as acting, but it's a wonderful skill to have, you'll spend a lot of time doing that. Are they are they speaking toward the front of their mouth with a little lisp or is their sound more back towards the back of their throat? Where where do you place the sound?
So, it's fun. It's another tool for you to have to play with to make you more versatile and be able to play more characters. If all you want to do is play yourself, then I hope you already have a good sounding voice. And there you go. But I think most of us want to be able to play a whole range of characters. Please tell me that you're going to work on your voice. I don't know what this accent is, but I'm just playing. To end this video, like, comment, subscribe, and I'll see you next week. Pretty much everybody's least favorite. See why you need to get in a voice class? - [music]
0 comments