Voice and The Actor - Blog Entry 4

For my last Blog post I looked at exercises to help the French dialect and loss of breath. These were two negatives aspects of my voice that I felt I suffered from when performing Man of Mode. I felt the exercises I picked helped me to overcome these obstacles and reach my objective of a clear voice. The exercise I picked to help with French dialect was using consonants with vowels, where I would say each consonant with each vowel after for example Ba, Be, Bi, Bo, Bu and then Ca, Ce, Ci, Co, Cu and so on. This technique is brilliant and it helps me to articulate each sound and learn the difference between sounds that I found difficult before for example the 'Th' sound and 'F' sound, this technique helped me a lot because there are words in the French language that require sounds being said differently to how they look for example the word éclat is pronounced Aclat. I did the exercise twice, once in my own accent and the second time in a French accent to try and improve my accent and French sounds. I think this helped a lot because I got to grips with the French accent and the words considering my character Sir Fopling Flutter speaks a lot of French. My other weakness from my last blog entry was my loss of breath, I felt that I was loosing breath in scenes and I wasn't finishing lines, I did some basic warm up exercises that helps with breath capacity and seeing through to the end of the line. A good exercise to help this was one I had learnt previously in a vocal warm up. I felt it catered to what I wanted and so I proceeded with the technique. The technique consists of breathing in for four beats then humming and going into to a sound as long as you can last. This helps with breath capacity as you are trying to increase the amount of breath you have to release and you go till you have to inhale, this helps push your breath capacity range and is a great technique to do before a production if time allows. 

I found this weeks results interesting, I am happy with the exercises I did and I think they will serve me well in the future.