MCM Voices' British Accents Mad Skillz Payola.

A few weeks ago, fellow voice talent and friend Philip Banks challenged his colleagues to a competition to see who could perform the best British accent (native Brits obviously ineligible). A few dozen souls took up the challenge, including me. At the end of the week a tie was declared between my dear friend Maureen Egan– and me! The prize was a box of fine European chocolates, which arrived this week.

The chocolates and their presentation are a work of art. From Chocolaterie Wanders of Virginia, they are packed in a wooden box and come with a small field guide to aid in identification. This is important, because subtle differences in morphology can make some of these little bon bons as difficult to ID as the “confusing fall warblers”. All are, of course, heavenly. Their elegance and good taste are a true reflection of the man who sent them. Thank-you Philip!

Red Letter Day at MCM Voices

Dialects for Voice Actors.

Yesterday I received an entertaining email from one of my favorite clients, Richard, for whom I’ve done several large jobs requiring accents. His company produces educational software and he hired me to provide an Australian voice for “Miss Melberry” in a maps and graphs project, and a Georgia accent for a lizard (“Miss Lizzy”) in a reading skills module. I’ve also done Teacher’s Voices on several occasions.

Richard’s email included an exchange he’d had with a 4th grade teacher in Lowell, Massachusetts who has just started using the maps and graphs software with Miss Melberry. She wrote that the kids “really enjoyed it” but that one of the children said of Miss Melberry, “She’s not from around here, is she?”

Richard’s response included the following:

“Actually, Miss Melberry is from western Massachusetts; or, at least, her voice is. If you'd like to learn more about the excellent voiceover artist who voiced Miss Melberry (and loves to do accents), check out http://www.mcmvoices.com/. She is very good.”

Well, you can see why Richard is one of my favorite clients.

Australian accents are not easy. One of the sounds that is exceptionally difficult for non-natives to produce is the long “o”. When I was working on this accent intensively I studied that “o” a lot, and took a couple of snippets from Gillian Lane-Plescia’s Australian and New Zealand Accents for Actors CD and listened to them over and over again. The first one, which you can listen to here, is the phrase “in a moment”. I pulled that off the CD and multiplied it so that it is 25 seconds of just that. The sound is almost like mye-oo-munt. Hard to transcribe, hard to say.

Building on that we come to the second snippet, which is, “I know that bloke’s going to roll over in his boat in a moment”. You can listen to that one here. Lots of long o’s to practise!! If you want to try it, break it up into shorter bits and practise each bit until it sounds good. Practise them all separately and then start to piece them together. If you can master that incredibly difficult phrase, you’ll be ready to take on Australia!

I recommend the Lane-Plescia CDs above all others I've used as the ultimate dialect resource for actors. The sound quality varies because many field interviews with native speakers are included. And of course, it’s those field interviews, as well as Ms. Lane-Plescia’s discussion of the sounds that make these dialects what they are, that are so valuable. You can order them directly from The Dialect Resource or, if you live in or are visiting certain major cities you can buy them in the stores listed.

Other dialect resources:

International Dialects of English Archives

The Speech Accent Archive

American Dialect Links

Say it Like a Texan

More on dialects in future posts. Feel free to add to the list above, which is rudimentary!

German Voice-over at MCM Voices!

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I love languages and that I’ve been taking Spanish for a while with the goal of being able to offer voice-over in Spanish. The language I’ve studied the longest besides English, however, is actually German. I started taking it in 7th or 8th grade, continued through high school and college, and the last German course I took was when I was a university faculty member back in the not-even-gonna say when-ties! I audited a course at that time, since I was considering spending some time at the University of Vienna working with a colleague in developmental evolutionary biology and wanted to brush up (I ended up working at the National Science Foundation instead). Because I started relatively young, my accent is close to perfect. I could get along just fine if you dropped me off in a Spanish-speaking country, but my German still sounds better than my Spanish right now. Still, I expected to be offering Spanish voice-over in the near future, not German. Last month, a German narration job dropped into my lap.

Okay, I actually moved my lap so that the job would fall in the right place. My friend Liz de Nesnera, who does voice-over in English and French, has a client who was looking for native German voice talent. I told her that if her client was desperate she could let him know that my German was very good. Apparently, he was, because he hired me. Not only that, he made the same mistake a few weeks later, and it looks like I’ll be working with him on a regular basis. I am really quite thrilled. It was a little scary at first, but I’m here to tell you, it is very good for us to stretch our wings and get out of the place where we’re comfortable.

So, it is back to school again for me. I took a one-week course in medical Spanish during interterm at the local college, and now am in Contemporary Culture (in Spanish) AND “high intermediate” German. I’ve survived the first week unscathed and am in linguistic heaven.

A link to a snippet of that first German narration job is here.

Dialects for Actors.

Today was the culmination of all our hard work in Dialects for Actors, in which we presented our scenes and monologues to a small audience at the Curtain Theatre.

The Curtain Theater

I should have been a nervous wreck, since I had never had to perform memorised lines on stage before, ever. I was far more nervous the first time I had to give a presentation at a professional meeting, to the extent that I leaned over and said to the person next to me, whom I did not even know, “I can’t do this”, and then got up and coolly gave my talk. That was years ago and since then I’ve given more public lectures than I can count, to hundreds of people at a time. Not memorised ones, but at least I’m not a stranger to public speaking. For Dialects, we had done a dress rehearsal on Tuesday and we knew in detail what we were supposed to do. I had seen a few costume glitches that I had time to correct and had thought of some new angles for my performance in Scottish dialect as Miss Jean Brodie that I felt would enhance it, and fortunately my professor approved this. I had been over my lines so many times that I couldn’t get them wrong, so that left only room for “productive butterflies”, the kind of nervousness that helps the performance rather than hindering it. My Cockney monologue as Nancy from Oliver Twist (see below for the text) was the first performance on the program and it went off without a hitch.

Nancy – Oliver Twist

Unfortunately I couldn’t watch my fellow students but I could hear them from backstage and they were all brilliant. I kept thinking how glorious it must be to be starting a career in acting at a young age. When people ask me why I went into voice-over I always say, “because I love acting but don’t like to be seen”. This experience, even though it was not a full-fledged production, made me start to think that maybe I don’t actually mind it that much after all.

Miss Jean Brodie

Of course the main thing is that I am now a Certified Dialect Specialist and voiceover dialects expert. Okay, that’s a complete fib. But I have the resources, or know where to find them, for most of the dialect work that is likely to come my way, and that is a very satisfactory thing indeed.

Note: Many people search Google for "nancy monologue oliver twist" and find this blog post. I'm not sure what you're looking for, but in case you need a script I'm posting the text of the monologue I used, which I got straight from Oliver Twist; you can read it here. I edited the text to shorten it in the interest of time, and that modified version is here. If it's a listen you're after, you can find that here (if I were to do it over, I'd make sure all the th's were more "f-ish").

Another vote for getting out of the house - Dialect Paradise!.

I wrote last week, and not for the first time, about the importance of getting out and doing things. Like going to a climbing wall (and by the way, yes I did go again, and yes I did try the more challenging route again and this time was successful!). But sometimes it’s far more routine things that turn out to be immensely rewarding.

We’ve gone to my brother’s family home for Easter dinner the last couple of years. This year they got an invitation from friends and those friends were kind enough to extend the invitation to us as well. We were touched and accepted gratefully. But as the day approached, we found ourselves wishing we could spend the day at home rather than make the 2+ hour drive each way. There was no question about not going, of course, and we made the journey. Thank goodness, because a fantastic surprise awaited us.

The other people at the gathering, besides my brother’s family, were terrifically interesting and funny. But that wasn’t the surprise. The astonishing thing was that four of them grew up in the Limerick region of Ireland, 3 were from south London and one was from Yorkshire!! A dialect student’s dream! This was my first opportunity since taking up an academic approach to the study of dialects for voice-over to hear some of this speech “live” rather than listening to recordings on the internet such as at IDEA or The Speech Accent Archive or NPR or films or the enormously valuable series of CDs produced by Gillian Lane-Plescia at The Dialect Resource. I was able to listen for and observe some of the patterns I had noticed in my academic work, along with the facial expressions and body language and all the rest that no mere voice recording can convey. I made no secret of my interest in their speech – I couldn’t if I had tried, and they in turn were fascinated by my voice work. In short, it was a wonderful day and we all parted great friends, with all sorts of plans and schemes for the future. Imagine if we had decided, “oh bother, let’s just laze the day away at home?”

Shudder.

Challenging the mind.

In some way I have always been somewhat jealous of people with routine - people who have the discipline to run a few miles every morning, who always read the newspaper and take the dog for three daily walks. Some of the people who do this can do it because they don’t have a lot going on in their lives, while many others are able to do it precisely because they have so much going on. Their life’s framework may be provided by their careers, and although they don’t do the same things every day, they have very disciplined ways of organising their lives, sometimes even making themselves do their required reading while on an exercise bike to ensure they take care of two necessary things at once, like Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts and MacArthur Award recipient.

I can’t seem to get into a routine at all, and in some way, I think I can’t do it because I want every day to be different. One of the things I love about voice-over work is that I usually have no idea what the day will bring, and whether it’s a big job or a small one, it’s almost always interesting and challenging. Last week I had two commercial spots to do for a new client in rural Michigan. The ads were for local businesses and had the potential to be quite ordinary, but they were far from it – one called for switching attitude several times within sixty seconds and included a quote from Micky Mantle, which gave me the opportunity to do a bit of research on Mantle and find a videotaped interview so I could hear what he sounded like. The other one required me to be the Easter Bunny! My client told me to get the recordings to him “whenever”, so I took a leisurely approach so that I could wait for the right Easter Bunny voice to come to me. The next day the producer emailed in a panic that the spot was airing after the weekend and did I need another copy of the script? So that Easter Bunny voice came to me in a flash and the job was quickly dispatched (you can hear the finished spot here). It was kind of a wild day, a lot of stuff going on. If I needed a lot of structure to my day I would probably be very frustrated. I did manage to get to my karate class but had to leave audio files uploading – something I don’t like to walk away from in case a problem occurs but I really needed the karate to help me unwind!

This weekend I tried climbing at a climbing wall. I’ve taken my kids to do this a number of times but had never tried it myself. Heights make me very nervous so I had to push away thoughts of fear and focus on the benefits and the physical challenge of it and was at the top of the wall in short order, ready to try a more difficult route. I couldn’t manage the harder route despite trying three times (I got to the top but had to use one or two footholds that weren’t on the route – of course the metaphor this offers for one's career path is obvious!) but am looking forward to going back next weekend and trying again. The people doing the belaying were college students and one of them has created her own major: wilderness studies, which I found simply fascinating. Now there is someone who is focussing her life on the unexpected and challenging. She will be leading wilderness trips and helping other people to achieve challenging goals, and I imagine this will require the ability to create structure and follow routine while being prepared for anything to happen. The ultimate in discipline! Something I don’t think I could ever do. In my life, being prepared for anything to happen is more about voice-over right now. This means having the discipline to follow a routine in certain areas, like making sure I am always contacting new people every week and following up. It includes challenging the mind with stuff directly related to voice-over, such as taking workshops or private training when finances allow or, something I’m doing right now, taking a dialects course in the university’s theatre department or (later in the year) more German, Spanish and French classes. I’m teaching myself to play the piano, which is not only great for exercising the mind but it’s wonderfully relaxing (and the dog loves it). And finally, pushing myself out of the house and into the world to try new things keeps me flexible and increases my ability to meet the unexpected and make the most of it.

Oh, and I almost forgot – it’s fun! See you at the top of the wall!

Taking funny voices seriously.

I’ve written here before about my early voice-over influences – more specifically, the “funny voices” influences. They were, unequivocally, Beyond the Fringe and to a lesser extent Mike Nichols and Elaine May. These people were funny. Funny enough to attract the attention of a 9-year old and keep it for the next several decades & beyond. This attraction played a significant role in my eventual choice to leave my career as a biologist in favor of one as a voice artist specialising in character voices and accents (as well as medical/science & museum narration). Now that I’m getting more and more work doing accents, however, I’m finding my biggest challenge to be to get away from the humor and take the voices seriously. I have several humorous Hispanic characters in my personal acting troupe, but I had to send them away recently when I was hired for a serious and somewhat dramatic project for Oregon artist Daniel Dancer of ArtfortheSky.com. Mr. Dancer wanted a “light Spanish accent” to narrate a short film on his art. Although the project, in hindsight, went smoothly, there was a lot of hand-wringing on my part. I had to really throw myself into the role and try to take myself seriously –more accurately, I had to forget myself in order to do the job properly. Forgetting one’s self is key. And definitely, forgetting about being funny is a must.

Currently, I’m taking a university theatre course on dialects. Talk about bliss! When class starts we have to sit in a circle and speak to each other in the dialect that is currently under study. As Tito (Cheech Marin) said in Oliver & Company, “Man, if thees eez torture, chain me to dee wall!!!!” I had hoped to get away from humor at least some of the time in this class, particularly during our work on standard British, since I sometimes feel that Beyond the Fringe has destroyed my chances of ever doing a British accent for a serious performance. Alas, I ended up being required to memorise a speech by Lady Bracknell from The Importance of Being Earnest, so “serious” was not to be. We are currently studying American Southern accents and may yet be called upon not to be funny; we shall see.