Unfold the variety of your voice! Your cornerstone for your characters
Discussion

Unfold the variety of your voice! Your cornerstone for your characters

This page is based on Simone Schwegler's workshop "Find your voice - Vom Spiel mit der Stimme". It was discovery journey from the first second until the last scene and Simone kept the energy high during the whole session. She teacheed with confident in the online medium, maintaining a high pace and pushed us discover all those characters that can be born from our voices.

Length: 1 x 2 hours
Punctuality: Because every participant must warm up their voices, I recommend to close the door after 10 minutes.

Goals

Do you carefully select a trait and put together your character from it? Do you add a peculiar body language, behaviour, a past story and experiences? And at the end you choose a voice for he/she? Do all your voices sound similar? Let's put this process upside down and start with a voice, one of those which we have never heard before. Then we will naturally build the character. At the end we will go home surprised with the huge possibilities of our until today unexplored voice.

The key skills to learn are:

Start building characters with our voice as starting point
Explore the potencial of our voice
Learn about all the factors which we could use to change our voice
Train our new discovered voices

The following games can be done online

Recommendations

Ask the students to explain their expectations before starting the workshop. This helps you understand what they are looking for
- Ask if they usually use different voices when playing characters
- Ask if they like the voices they get
Ask for feedback after each games to see if the students grasp the goals of them
A short break of 5 minutes after 60 minutes gives smokers the opportunity to go outside and reloads the energy of the group

Presentation and warm-up

Presentation: Say your name and what voice you often remember? why?
1-7 Counting: Online game. The moderator gives an order to the participants. They have to count until 7 and then start from 1. Thumb up means that the next player comes. Thumbs down means that the last player has to count again, the counting goes backwards
Voice warm-up:
- Look for a song you remember and you can sing
- Breath deep and realize how your diagram moves ups and down
- Start singing and put your hand on the stomach. Make it vibrate.
- Put your hand on your chest, the vibrations have to be there
- Put your hand on your neck, the vibrations have to be there
- Put your hand on your chicks, the vibrations have to be there
- Put your hand on your heaps and try to make the legs vibrate
- Ask the students if their voice has changed
Voice warm-up II: Easy warm-up using the Android App 7 Minute Vocal Warm-up If you are doing an online session, you will have to connect the phone with your computer using bluetooth and set it as audio source
Vocal warm-up III

Imitation circle: One players does one voice and calls the name of a second one who will imitate him/her. Then he imitates a voice and names a third player

Dimensions of your voice

Where the voice comes from?
Volume
Speed/Tempo
Short/Long breathing
Intonation/Accentuation/Pauses
Mouth movement
Emotion/Intention
Sounds filling the gaps between words
Dialects/Accents

You can change all this elements to create a new never heard voice!

Games in pairs or quadruplets

Voice switch: Player A is the director and he just says “switch” every 20-30 seconds. Player B invents one voice and keep it until he heards “switch” and then he starts with a new one. The new character may only make noises without outhering any word. The “director” give inspiration saying “louder”, “tired”, “accent”, etc. It is important to use your own feelings to invent the next voice: if your excited the next character may be loud, if you want a pause the next character may have a slow tempo
Dubbing a scene: Two students play a scene without talking. Two others must dub the scene with special voices and they start talking before the scene start to influence the body language of the students playing the scene.
Dubbing a scene of a famous movie: Each pair gets a link to a youtube video and they must dub the scene with their voices. This is nice training to do at home

The group enjoyed these games