Using British Culture to Perfect Your Accent (Pt. 1 of a series)
Ian Price and David Rosenthal
Americans and The British speak differently, and think differently as well. And that affects the way we speak. Ian Price is not only a voice-over and on-camera actor, he runs a successful graphic design and branding practice in London and San Francisco. Oh, and he's from England, which makes him the perfect resource for creating a precise British Accent. Here, he works his magic on Sir David Rosenthal.
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Yes, I have other things to do today, BUT, IVC has so MUCH! Great lesson #1. Love the professional help! Excellent context for the British lesson. Thank you!
Transcript
IVC embraces the use of audio and video as teaching tools -- and you should too. Examples come to life when heard, and become 3-D when seen and heard. We provide a transcript to help you with note taking or searching our site…but recommend that you push "play!" Hey everyone, I'm David Rosenthal and I'm here with Ian Price. Hi Ian. Ian: Hi. David: Ian is our resident expert in British dialect and accent and I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about what I need to do as an American actor if I see that the audition requires a British accent. I can do one. I know a lot for me involves listening - that the way I became "alright" at having a British accent was through intensive listening to all different sorts of British dialect to absorbing it and to recreating that as much as possible, but is that all there is to it? Ian: That's crucial. I mean that is a really important thing to do and also I think what's important is to find a voice that you want to listen to and that you feel resonates with your own voice, a British voice, and stick with it and listen to it over and over and over again. It's much better to listen to the same passage a dozen times than to listen to 12 different passages by the same person because you need to actually nail that particular sound. But over and above that it's kind of perhaps thinking about the culture of the county and putting yourself in the place of a British person. For example if a lot of British people were standing in line, if they were in a que, and somebody que jumped so they cut in line, what would happen I think in America is that somebody else who was in that line would point out the error... David: They'd be outraged! Ian: Yeah, and no offense would be taken because people would realize they'd made a mistake and they'd take their place. In England that DEFINITELY wouldn't happen. Nobody in the que would say a word. They might say things under their breath to each other, but because it's a much more "private", kind of closed society, it doesn't do to make a spectacle of yourself. So the way that might, I suppose, inform an audition is just to kind of bear in mind just how important something like muttering is to British people because people would be muttering against themselves and they might be saying "are we invisible", "can't they see us", but just amongst themselves. And also the thing that carries in muttering is the importance of the consonant because it's much easier to mutter with consonants than it is with vowels. Vowels make louder noises. So I suppose the lesson from that is to kind of think about bringing it down because there can be a tendency to make things too big. David: Alright so lets put this to practice. I'm going to give you a line "Don't forget to dress for dinner" and I'm going to say that as an American speaking in a British accent and you can tell me in terms of the muttering, in terms of the consonants, how to work with that. Ok....Don't forget to dress for dinner. Ian: Well that was actually really good in terms of the level of tone because I was almost expecting you to do something too big. So the level of tone was good. I think there could have been a little bit more emphasis on the "T" because that consonant thing is really important. David: In the "don't". Ok.. Don't forget to dress for dinner. Ian: Don't forget....yeah. And the end syllable, there's a little bit too much of the American "R", I mean it's virtually there but it's more of an "uh" sound and loose the "R" completely. So it's "din-uh" David: "Din-uh" Ian: Exactly. David: Don't forget to dress for dinner. Ian: Yeah, that's pretty good. I mean we can talk - that "R" sound is a really kind of crucial one and a really crucial difference between American English and British English so we can kind of talk about that a little bit.
? David: Yeah, we'll talk about that in a different video, but until then, don't be late for dinner! Ian: It's at 7.
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