preparing and auditioning for voice-over work

for the next leg of this topic, maybe before discussing auditioning, we should discuss voice and diction classes…

when my daughter first started auditioning in nyc, almost every time, the casting director would ask her where she was from…we just couldn’t understand why she kept being asked this…
one day i was talking to someone about this and they said, “that’s b/c she has an accent”…
what? no she doesn’t…she sounds find…but being the type of person i am, I trusted this person’s opinion and I brought her to the best speech coach in the business, sam chwat…

he spent an hour with her and then brought me into the room…he told me that she did not pronounce her “th”…she dropped the “d” off the end of her words…her inflection was very hard new york, and she dropped her jaw every time she would say the sounds “aw”…p.s., she had tons of work to do to get rid of her “new yawk accent”, which i didn’t even realize she had…
now she speaks “american standard” – and after learning from sam, most people do not…oh yeah, she slips now and then…especially when she gets excited…and yes, she has new york “inflections” and accents, but that aids her usually and she can control it…did this take a lot of work on her part…you bet…the better part of a year…diligently practicing and recording and listening to herself several times a day!

okay…so I didn’t get to auditioning…but I did cover preparing! [pat on the back]…

tomorrow, i’ll get into auditioning…but please remember, unless you or your child actor is going to be a character voice-over specialist, he has to speak in american standard english or pretty darn close to it…he/she should be minus any regional accents…

we’ll pick this topic up again tomorrow…
hugs and out~