Lessons

Lesson Info

Techniques to Maintain Your Energy & Save Your Voice

So welcome back this is our class that will teach you some techniques for keeping your energy strong and your voice strong as well because you need both of those things and especially if you're teaching a course that goes over a number of days you may need some techniques that you're not used to yet so we're going to start here it's a principle that we see in all of performance and it's called act as if does that mean it means yes you may get tired act as if you are super energized you may be feeling maybe not so confident at times act as if you are supremely confident it's this tool that performers know and that we call on all of the time sometimes we say well you just got to get the job done right if you're doing a two day or a three day or even a one day there may be times during the day that your energy lags sometimes that time is right after lunch lunch lunch okay so sometimes she'll see something like this I too much after lunch but what do you do you act as as they were super ro...

y yes sir for that clap that was very love yes you have to imagine that you are awake and there you are now of course I was also relaxing you know resting on justin or producer because I don't have to socialize during the breaks that's, right? So one of the things that is really important is to re charge. So if you are going, going, going, going, teaching and then there's a break and then if you have a studio audience, they start coming asking you questions and you feel obligated to answer them. Next thing you know, you barely had time to sit down, have a glass of water toa freshen up. What have you so, really, if you needed take time away there's a green room and you can just rest there's a little couch in there and angela and it matters because it's not just your content that makes you effective. It is your performance that makes you effective, not just one or the other, so we already know the that you all are experts out there, you have content, we need to see you bring your energy. It makes such a difference for really giving a world class performance on creative life. Another thing to remember is that at home, not everybody is in the room with you. They may come in and out at any part, and so they're not getting a whole wave of times where the energy's really high and times where we're more intense and played and meaning awful, you need to keep your energy up the whole time you never know when someone's going to be joining you, and whenever they are, you want to be there, have your energy present for them and have it be meaningful to them, and it doesn't mean you've got to be bouncing off the walls at all times, you know, it's like, hey, what's up, you know you don't need to do that, but energy can also be very focused, so I could be standing here without moving a lot and I can be directly into camera very connected and very focused. I can even tell on emotional story that is quiet, but because my energies directed forward it steal, it still feels up, it still feels like it has some significance to it as opposed to this look, you see, even just a little body language, I'm back on my heels now you see that all of a sudden it's a totally different feeling, then being actually forward and engage with us, look, look at the difference in the body, so back on the heels, right? And obviously I'm doing that is an exaggeration so you can see but or forward like we're talking or excited and there's this forward movement in your energy because your body is moving toward the camera or toward the people who are in the room. Now that's true with your voice too in the same way that michael just demonstrated going back on the heels physically sometimes you'll see people will drop their voices back and the energy won't be outward moving energy that gets the sound out that gets the sound out the front of your face case and there are techniques that you can study but if you just think of it like that that you're looking to communicate with your body with your voice with your words then that makes a huge difference in terms of keeping your energy up and the energy up for the people who are watching unfortunately you have a microphone so you don't need to yell right? One of the things that we see with the creative life instructors sometimes is that they start to lose their voice over the course of the day or the two days of three days because they're doing so much talking and they're not used to it and they don't necessarily have voice production skills they haven't trained themselves they haven't trained their breathing they even trained their voice their speech and so they start to push on their voice thinking they have to make tons and tons of noise but there's actually microphone now there's a there's a there's a great guy in the booth who's adjusting levels we get louder he starts to bring it down a little bit so that the level stays consistent but at the same time if you're talking like this the whole time it's not just that it's quiet is that it may start teo get low energy so again you don't have to be loud but you need to keep moving forward and from time to time you'll get loud or other times you're going to be quieter but that contrast is quite nice the contrast is what's quite nice good so now speech yes, the schools we spend when we were in graduate school, I went to the graduate acting program it and why you for three years and came into the school of drama for three years and we spent hours and hours and hours a day working on voice and speech techniques for three years for three years but what you'll notice about our voices I think in our speeches we sound like regular people I hope we found like regular we don't sound like we're talking to you like this mess peons talking on the stage now just speak and sometimes we mumble over word sometimes way lose our breath I mean these are all normal things in what you want is very naturalistic performance you want to really you want the people at home and the sooner you feel like your normal human being so you don't need to change necessarily your speech but what's interesting about speech it's two things primarily for my perspective one the the level of volume you use is not as important as your articulation you can use a lot of volume but not be articulate and they will have trouble hearing people very, very big deep voices often I have a harder time conveying their message because if their speech is not very articulate because the sound that big vibe vivat story sounded just rolls together so you're trying to do is chew on your words a little bit because the second thing that is so important is the way the sounds make you feel so for example, the word cut feels very different than the word love cut love and so this is a big topic to unpack that we're not going to do here but you may start thinking about your speech and asking yourself the question do you think you need some speech work or some voice work? Do you feel like you lose your voice easily? Do you feel like you run out of breath often do you feel like you get tight in the throat and it's caught back here? And do you feel sometimes like you mumble people told you that you mumble so if you if the answer's yes, any of these things you might consider working with a voice coach or a speech coach fair enough perfect ok, great that's all I've got to say on voice and speech I think we should talk for a moment though about handheld mikes and how to use them versus wireless mikes to do that so we have a hand held mike and wireless might even though it is currently in my hand it's not normally where it is so going to give you the hand held mike this wireless mike we talked about in a previous segments that you don't want to hit you want to hit it when you're speaking of course and you also don't want to cover it with your hand like this if I cover it with my hand, we're going to start having trouble hearing me and that now normally wouldn't do it around your throat because that was weird but for women you might see that if you have a lower cut neckline I might be talking telling a heartfelt story and go to put my hand over my heart and you wouldn't hear me as well then of course and for men to it's often on a shirt or a blazer jacket yeah, yeah blazer the other thing is that you're in a place where you have professionals so you probably don't have to worry about this. However you may need to pay attention to what happens to the cord during your segment, so if you know we have the little pack back here but if you've got the pack back here and all of a sudden the cord falls out of your waist or your pocket wherever it is and now the court is dangling it looks bad and be the audience starts to get nervous that something's gonna happen to it that is going to get caught and it's going to pull out and when they're nervous watching you it's it's it's they can't pay attention can't listen this well what they can't listen yes he's going to keep doing I do I'm going to keep doing it just like fantastic so that's that's it that's it with the hand that's it with the wireless okay? So with a handheld we wantto look at placement because sometimes people don't know where to have it and they'll talk with it like they're talking at the belly button or they'll put it to close and they'll be the mouth fred audit and you'll get all of this very muscly sound so you want to have it close enough to the mouth was the phrase used like an ice cream like ice cream cold like an ice cream on one that you're licking but it's you know it's right below your chin just two inches not in front your face because this would you could hear it here, but that would look weird on camera so is right below and by the way you might not think this is a big deal you know what it's just a big deal this well after we did the previous segment where we talked about hitting the mike the the audio crew and the camera crew ran downstairs said that this has to be mandatory for every single instructor because the majority of structures don't realize how how much they interfere with the sound when they do things like hit themselves are hit the mic rather or you know, put this in a weird place or not pass it around properly there like and then of course yes their way that was the voice of god from up in the boot who will be really, really happy if you can help people pass us around quickly make sure that they have it when they're speaking because people will just start speaking and forget that they need a mic if they're not mike themselves and then you make sure you take good care of this and don't hit it simple is that and then everything goes smoothly and they can hear you properly because if they can't think about what the consequences of that are if the sound is not good if they cannot hear you it's the same thing as if you lost all visual so these couple of tech tech teachings no tech tool teaching use them that's the end of this segment who thank you I know I got I gotta go back to sleep on he's tired over here