SELF-TAPES

Self-Tapes have become an essential tool in an actor’s portfolio and have been much more frequently requested during the pandemic. But don’t be apprehensive about self-tapes. They are a fantastic way to quickly show-off what you can do and give a first impression about who you are as a performer.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the technology but remember the KISS principle: Keep It Simple Stupid.  

I think, especially in musical theatre, casting directors are very understanding that we are locked down, sporting our best Zoom tops and pyjama bottoms, and doing our best to present professionally from a home set-up.  What they really want to see…is our TALENT!

We don’t need all the gadgets and software (not saying these wouldn’t be lovely) but If I could recommend just 3 simple things to enhance our self-tapes they would be:

1)  a plain background

2)  a tripod for your phone to film

3)  a speaker to create a good sound balance

A PLAIN BACKGROUND allows the audience/audition panel to focus on you! I actually have fun playing with different plain backgrounds or using a solitary chair, but that’s really just to give my personal self-tapes some differentiation. You can see this on my IGTV with the 16 Bar Challenge. For an audition self-tape I film against a plain wall. If you don’t have a plain wall, can you create one or hang a curtain or sheet? Home décor or clutter can detract from your work. If you have the budget, a pop-up screen could be a really good investment if you struggle to find plain backgrounds at home.

A TRIPOD for your phone enables you to get the height, angle and distance exactly right when filming. This is a huge plus. Frame yourself properly from the outset and you won’t need to do any editing. The only editing I want to do is where my tape is going to start and end! Then direct upload – done and dusted! On this point, remember not to stand too close to the wall so you don’t cast a visible shadow.  And you want to stand far enough back from the phone to give yourself good framing (in landscape, perhaps from the navel up) and to be a decent distance from the phone’s microphone so it picks up the sound of your voice in the room without distortion. 

A SPEAKER to play your backing track (eg Bluetooth speaker: I use a medium sized Ultimate Ears model) will help to achieve a full, rich sound in the room.  It’s important to position this speaker behind you for a good sound balance being picked up in your phone’s recording.  It may also need to be off to one side if you’re standing near a wall, but basically you want to be closer to your phone than the speaker is.  If playing your track in iTunes another tip is to put this track last in a playlist (so another track doesn’t start afterwards), but use the end of the previous track to give yourself time to press record and get yourself ready in front of the camera.  You can have a relaxed start this way and simply cut it afterwards.

So, I hope these first tips are helpful. I’ve coached so many self-tapes over Zoom the last couple of years, I would say it’s a great time saver if you can work with a director/coach.  Someone who can guide your singing and acting to bring out your best, but who can also yell “Cut” when you should start again and avoid taping the whole song multiple times. They will help you get the best take from the outset and minimise the time needed to choose and edit your final take.

Next blog will delve more into the Acting Through Song for Camera.  But this one is to get you set up! My class is already available on Catch-Up at The Sing Space if you weren’t able to join me live. See you in the Challenge! 

Singers Who Lift

A few months ago, I started a blog for Singers Who Lift. I am a professional singer working in both the classical and musical theatre worlds, and have also been a dedicated gym bunny for at least a decade. As a dancer, I take my gym training seriously as part of my job and worked with amazing trainers to learn exercises properly.

For years, a lot of my singing colleagues – especially in the classical world – would ask me if I didn’t find that weight lifting put strain on my voice. No. I’d never noticed any problems or correlation between training and how my voice felt or responded.  That said, I’d always prided myself on strong technique, both as a singer and on the gym floor.

Then the pandemic occurred and suddenly I was not singing, not dancing and not training at the gym. Theatres and gyms were closed for lockdowns and beyond. In fact I spent the best part of 16 months without a gym. I still sang at home and did a resistance band workout most days, but my routine was not the same. When I finally returned to the gym, I started noticing a problem with the tension in or around my larynx and I realised that my alignment was out of whack and my technique somewhat rusty.

As a vocal coach, I knew some of the reasons behind this and quickly fixed my issue with careful attention to my technique and breath. But now that I better understood what colleagues were experiencing, I decided I wanted to learn much more and explore practical ways to combat this issue, not just for myself but for my colleagues and clients….singers who lift!  And so begins a series of posts on laryngeal function in lifting, glottic closure, subglottic air pressure, and perhaps most importantly: best practices for breath flow which I am personally trialling on the gym floor.

I’d love others to join the conversation and share our experiences as singers who lift. So drop me a line and please join me in this community #singerswholift 

Sondheim Masterclass

I had such a great time at our Sondheim Masterclasss this week, I thought I’d post a series of blog posts to complement the class.

First up, and meant without any offence, if musical theatre was a religion, Sondheim would be a god. In all sincerity, the messages he has to share with us preach truth and clarity, and could have perhaps been delivered in any number of formats, but he grew up with Oscar Hammerstein as a mentor and happily for us, musical theatre is his medium. So it’s as a composer that he shares his insights into humanity.

Certainly in my life, I have been guided by Sondheim’s philosophies expressed in his lyrics. He has an uncanny insight into the human condition, and that is what the great playwrights of the theatrical canon have to share with people. So as audience members, the characters and situations in these shows may be far removed from our lives, extreme or even fantastical, but the human experience that they are living is something that has the capacity to resonate with our own experiences.

When we go to the theatre and can see something about our own experience in another person’s story…this is what moves us, inspires us and maybe starts to provide us with some answers about what we are experiencing ourselves. And that to me is the most powerful theatre,

And Sondheim does that in musical theatre. I believe that is one reason he has such a legion of fans, because we feel moved by his work and we feel connected to his work and to that experience. It also means as artists that it’s a huge challenge to rise to and do the work justice.  More on that coming in my next post!

Something special about Sondheim is that he writes both the music and the lyrics, and that creates such a synthesis of music and text which is a gift to us as actors, because he has thought through all the elements of interpretation for you.  He has considered the speech rhythm, the emphasis, the direction of the line, and because there’s this perfect marriage of text and music, of lyrics and rhythm, he’s shaped the line, the lyric, the rhythm, the phrase as an interpretation. So we can see how he’s scored something, and already have a clue into how he envisaged this being interpreted.

With pitch as well, he knows when to keep an actor in their speech register and when to exploit the upper range when the emotional stakes are raised. So in terms of acting through song, the way the melody is shaped is already giving us so many clues as to where the height of that feeling is, and what the actor needs to do, going up, going down, and how their expression should be shaped. And that’s one of the marvellous aspects of his writing. The fact that he has taken complete control of the music and lyrics that he’s able to be so specific about what he is communicating to us on the page.

Sondheim may be challenging to learn but the effort is immensely rewarding. The Sondheim repertoire I’ve sung stays with me and I’m frequently guided by it. Often when I find myself contemplating some challenge or difficulty or decision….Sondheim has the answers.  The answers that you need will be somewhere in one of his characters, one of his lyrics…there will be clarity. And I just love that he has shared all these lessons with us, and it happens to be through the medium of musical theatre. 

I hope you have the chance to enjoy my Sondheim Class at The Sing Space and more coming here soon….