First practice of Children's Story

In our lesson today we started to have a first look at performing an extract of our solo performances into a microphone. I decided to work on my children's story Disney's Atlantis - The Lost Empire simply because I think I will have to work on this piece as it requires extra character voices.

I started of by running the first page of the book so that I would become familiar with the text and I could start experimenting with different voices. Because all of the voices in the extract were men and I am clearly not a man, I had to try and find something that would resemble to voice of a young enthusiastic man. I think the voice sounded very husky as I think if I was to make him sound well spoken I would either make him sound quite feminine or it would become too old for the character. With his lines I would also added a lot of inflection to certain words like "Atlantis" as this is a keyword in the story that the children would need to be able to hear.

Then we got to perform the extracts into the microphone in front of everyone so that we could get some constructive criticism. We started talking about were the best place would be for the actor to stand in front of the microphone so that their voice would be picked up and not muffle into the microphone. For my piece I decided to stand a hand distance away from the mic as I thought I would be loud enough to be picked up by the mic and I would not hear my popping onto the mic. I then had to adjust the microphone to the perfect height and also find a good position in which to hold my book so that I could read from it whilst talking into the microphone.

Once I had performed the piece, the class said I had the right narration inflection in my voice that meant keywords were clearly notice and it was slow enough so that people were able to understand what was going on. I did get some constructive criticism that said my man's voice could have been deeper in tone to make him sound more like a man however the husky quality seemed to work for the character.

We then had a few minuets to practice and improve upon the criticisms we were given and then we would re-perform the extracts again one last time with the new improvements. We I added the deeper tone to the voice I defiantly heard the difference to the character and I believe it did sound more like a man. However I believe that I must keep the inflection in the character's dialogue, otherwise the character starts to sound a lot older then it should be.