In this video, professional voice instructor Jennifer Rutherford of International School of Music, and private teacher in Bethesda Maryland, describes how to prepare for a competition like American Idol, or any other audition. Some tips on preparation, vocal health, song choice, and audition etiquette are covered. Warm ups are also suggested and demonstrated with student and model, Mair. The video assumes that candidates will have some level of training or natural ability, but would also be useful for the amateur interested in pursuing training for a career in singing.

At the end of the day, a character is fully created when it is no longer seen as a character, but a person. But how do we make this change? Where do we get the necessary information and tools to make this possible?

This is the 2nd of a four week series in which we will look at all these tools: today we look at observation.

OBSERVATION:

When experience is not enough, observation comes into play. The main problem though, is that we see, but we don’t really look. This routine has made us superficial. Since seeing is an activity that requires no effort, its results are passive and blurry, but looking requires an effort to appropriate oneself with a reality through a voluntary act. To look to really look, gives us a part of that reality; and with that fragment we can make the whole reality, assimilating it as if we had lived it. For example, observing prostitutes in their walks, pregnant women and their difficulties to move, blind in their hesitant walk, crazy people in psychiatric hospitals, are means to grasp a part of their circumstances and from that, as much as possible, deduce their entire personality.

When we speak about the necessity for actors to have an intense life, we try to make them understand that their body should be very sensitized to absorb what happens around them, and that this sensitivity absorbs and is stimulated when you visit museums, when you read good books, even listening to good music…

Next week we look at our next tool; Research.

In film, you sometimes encounter actors who think they’re going to steal the scene by being big, and bombastic. Proving their value. Those actors are using their bodies and voices instead of their brain! They don’t realize in terms of voice and action, less is more.

Sometimes you encounter the great theater actor who (like all of us) needs to pay bills so is forced to “stoop down” and participate in a film production gig between productions of his Titus Andronicus. Now you put a camera on him. And everyone goes into hysterics. Watch. Now the voice is too loud, and the gestures that once left an entire auditorium audience gasping are over-exaggerated and seem fake. If I’m playing opposite somebody like this, I often think the best thing to do is to come under him. To stick to naturalism, and usually he is left feeling and looking pretty stupid.

In theater, you expect to see great actors acting. On stage, you have to project your voice or the words will sink without a trace into the third row of seats. On stage, the basic premise is ACTION, you have to sell your attitudes to the audience. In movies, the microphone can always hear you no matter how softly you speak, no matter where the scene is taking place. In movies it is REACTION that gives a moment its potency. That’s why listening in films is so important, as well as the use of the eyes in the close-up. You don’t have to shout and scream. You never need to do it big.

Remember that the camera will love you and catch even the smallest detail of your performance. You don’t need to over do it.