Bite-Sized Acting: How to Create an Engaging and Believable Character

1. Welcome to the Class!: And welcome to did a school online's bite-sized acting class. This is a series of classes designed to help you with your acting ability in a bite-sized matter. If this is your first byte size class and welcome, my name is Luke and diamond theater coach here at theta school online, a school determined to provide quality peer training to anyone anywhere, at anytime in this class, we're looking at how to create an engaging and belief or character. We're looking at particularly how we can create depth in our characters, and how we can actually create these characters from our own imagination. This will be helpful for thirst that struggle with Crane that are in characters or heard it struggle even to developing the erin characters. And you want to engage audiences more in their work. As your therapist, I'm here to answer any of your questions and I'm gonna be here all the time to help you along the way. But also make sure that you join in on the conversation as well and that you help others as you see fit. We are a community here, and so we want to help each other the best way that we can by joining in discussions during our projects and just having fun. So with that said, let's get straight into the class. 2. How to Build a Base for Character Development: Welcome to the last journey, creating your own character. In this lesson, we're going to be looking at how to create out base for our character. Specifically, we're gonna be looking at stereotypes and what stereotypes are, and how we can use the stereotype to develop our characters. But first we want to look at what is a stereotype. A stereotype is a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of personal thing. It is important for us to think about these simplified ideas of stereotypes in order for us to think creatively and to explore our characters. So what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna do an exercise to help you with the idea of stereotypes. So let's get straight into that now, what I want you to do is I want you to find a spot where you can relax, feel comfortable. We're not going to be moving for now, but we are going to be thinking and we are going to be closing our eyes. So what I want you to do is I want you to close your eyes right now and just follow my voice and listen to the instructions that I keep. I'm gonna give you some names of different types of people. And when I say these people, I want you to imagine what they actually look like. You're going to use your imagination to create the image in your mind of what these different type of papal look like. So with your eyes closed, with you relaxed. Let's use our imagination to think about what is the first thing that comes to our mind of what a nurse looks like. What pops into your head when you think of a nurse, a young mother owed? I think male or female. Do they look clean? Or maybe they're a bit dirty and scruffy. What image comes to your mind when you think of an us? Try and paint a picture in your head of what they look like. You can open your eyes now. So what was there in their mind? What did you think when he heard the word nurse? Maybe he thought of an older woman who was clean. So there are certain types of ideas are presented when we think about these different types of people with the nurse, we all thought maybe a certain way. But even if he didn't think that way, it's interesting to note what you did think about. Even if you didn't think a certain way. It is totally fine because we all think different things. But these notions and ideas that we think about are actually what stereotypes. So let's think about another type of person. So again, I want you to close your eyes, relax again. And let's just use our imagination. Okay, this time, I want you to think about a firefighter. What do you think about when you think of a firefighter? Let your mind just naturally wander to the image. Don't try to force what the image might be in your mind. Just whatever first comes to mind. And just have a look at this person. Are they male or female? Again, clean or dirty? Today? Look like they have some muscle or really lean and fit. What type of clothing other even wearing? Crate, keep your eyes closed. But now we're gonna move on to another type of person. What do you think about when you think of a skater? Someone who rides skateboards. How long did they? Again, thinking about gender, maybe male or female. What are they wearing? Take that time to think about what you say and let's examine what they look like. You know, how did they stand in your mind? Excellent. Keep your eyes closed. We're gonna move on to our final one. This final one, I want you to think about a teacher. What do you think about when you hear teacher? What does the teacher, where? What do they look like? Did they look really smart? Or do they look like they don't know what they're doing? Today look like they're in control. What do they look like? They scrambling around. Again, we all have different ideas for what does your mind come to when it think of teacher. Now, open your eyes. How did you guys, I'm sure you had very vivid images and ideas in your mind of the different type of people that we looked at. So if it didn't, it is totally fine. Feel free to actually go back and try these again, replay it, and let your mind come to these ideas by itself. It's a really fun exercise to do to first build the base of your character or your idea for a character. Looking at the stereotype and won't we perceive in our mind when we think about these different types of people? Now you should have an idea of how stereotypes are all around us and how we can use these characters to start developing out acting ability. Sometimes when using stereotypes, It is actually better to break those stereotypes and not do what is traditionally thought, oh, when thinking of that type of character. But again, that comes with developing our character over time. Hopefully, you can use those stereotypes as your starting point for developing other characters. But in our next lesson, we're going to be looking at how we can develop our stereotypes more through the concept of status. 3. How Status Changes the Way You Act: Hello, and thanks for joining us. In the last lesson, we looked at what a stereotype is and how stereotypes that can affect the way that we think about different types of people. In this lesson, we're looking at the concept of status and how status can actually affect the way a character acts. Status can be thought of as the power of a character and affects the way that a character interacts with other characters in the same or the world around them. The two forms of status are high and birth status and may go on to explore them in this lesson, we're going to start off with a couple of exercises that I want you to complete, to start off with. I wanted to find a spot in your variant where he can stand up and wanted to be able to move it a little bit. There's a little space where you can actually complete this exercise. If you're not able to get up somewhere in your room, sitting at your desk, or sitting way if your countable is totally fine, I'll give you time to complete the exercise scenario ne, to pause the video. Just keep it playing and to swell along with my cuz as I got, what I wanted to do is I want you to take up as little space as physically possible. How can you make your body and your physical space, sir, small? Let's try that now. As I'm talking, let's try and make our spaces physically small as possible. How do we make our body as small as possible? And we squeeze in different parts of our body to make yourself smaller. Try it now, keep going. Now, I want you to actually start fidgeting with your hair. Stop playing with your hair little bit budgeting. Maybe start to look down. Look down at the floor. Keep your gaze looking down. Maybe you start to hunt, show shoulders a little bit. Start touching your face. You're doing great. Keep it up. Great. Let's stop right there. Take just a few seconds here to think about what these actions made you feel. The actions may have made you feel like you had no confidence and that you are a bit insecure. This is what we call low status. Your characters power is low, as seen through the body language. Let's try this again. This time I'll give some different cues and instructions. So again, be sure that you're listening to me and following as I gotta make sure that you have ample room this time because we will do a little bit of movement. And I want you to follow along as I go. I want you to roll your shoulders back, their chests up a little bit and look dead straight ahead. Don't keep your eyes of that point straight ahead of you. And I want you to take two steps forward. To strong steps forward. Keeping your eye directly forward. Chin is slightly lifted. Great. Now, relax. So that was quite different rat, had you feel with that one? With that you may have felt a bit more competent. I can have a bit of power as well. This is what is called high-status. And it's quite different from low status, right? We have nouns for the two types of status. Status is not always as extreme as those two examples that we just did. And sometimes characters can actually switch between high and low sadness depending on the scene and the play. Let us revisit one of the characters that we have looked at in the first lesson on stereotyped characters. The teacher, if you're not able to stand up and move around, make sure that you modify these exercises in your chair or wherever you feel comfortable. Thinking back to this teacher, whatever gender that you thought of, I want you to change the agenda so that it matches your own gender. Because now you are going to become the teacher. For this exercise. You're going to act like the teacher. And what else we need to do is, I want you to play an actor scene where you are in control. You are going to tell you the students sit down. You're going to tell your students to be quiet and you're going to tell your students to not do anything n0. So you're going to act this out for about 30 seconds. I'll give you a bit of time in this video to do that. And we're gonna do it live so that we are going to complete the exercise as we go. I'll give you time now to complete the exercise. Fantastic job. And I sometimes it can be difficult to think about what to say or what to do. But the main thing is you should just keep going and keep trying. Now, we're going to try the exact same thing again. But this time when he played the teacher, I don't want you to be in control. I want you to be as competent. Maybe it's your first day on the job. You go into tribe to lead this class. But remember, you're not confident teacher. So how would you move? How would you think? How would you actually act as this teacher without any confidence? So I'm gonna give you time again. And you can do that now. And relax down, grab it, see if you haven't already. And how did it feel different the first time to the second time? I'm sorry, did I remember the first time you'll really competent. You felt like you were in control really. But then that second time to actually control the students. So you can see our status has a way to affect our character and the way that we act. And it's good for you to use status as a way to show more about who your character is. In this exercise, we looked at how the teacher stereotype can be influenced by high or low status. I know this was a big lesson and hopefully you got something out of it. But in the next lesson, we are going to be looking at how we can further develop our character and creating a background about who our character is and more information about them. So I'll see you there. 4. The Key to Making Your Character Believable: Welcome to the next lesson. In the last lesson, we looked at how we could create characters and change them through status. In this lesson, we're going to discuss how we can make our characters more believable by looking at how we can develop our characters through theory, makes sure that you have printed out a copy of the character profile resource. We will be using this in the lesson today. Okay, so here we are with our current profile resource. First thing we need to discuss, what is a character profile? Well, a carriage profile is a record of detailed information about who your character is. It is where you're going to provide in-depth thinking about the history of this character and how they relate to others in the world around them. Character profile allows an actor to know more about the role they are playing. Therefore making them more believable in the performance of that character. The more you know about the character, the more you go be that character. So for this exercise, I want you to choose one of the four serotypes that we looked at in this stereotypes lesson. Either the nurse, five ARRA, Skype aura or teacher. It doesn't matter about the gender of the stereotype. As for this exercise, you will transform the agenda and to your orange agenda. So whatever gender you thought about, just transform it into your agenda so you can choose any of the four. Now, we're going to use his character profile web shade that help develop stereotype character that we have chosen to have more depth and personality. I'll do an example along with you. And I'll be doing the stereotype of the teacher. So basically you're going to fill in each section of this worksheet to help provide more details about your character that you've chosen just now. So first thing that we must do is we must give our cat a name. Remember your character's name is highly important as a mirror veil information about their heritage. For example, I'm going to name my character mock, neighboring, mock named Barry. He's also known as Mr. named Mary to students. It's good to think about that as well because you're thinking about, well, what situations might your character Bian, who might call them certain names or say. In a situation I've decided that my carrot is the teacher stereotype. Sir. His students would probably call Mr. name very well. Maybe they might get my nickname, Mr. Nine a, for example. Then obviously next, eager to the H. Now, with age, again, you don't need to think about the stereotypical image of the character that you talked about. You can transform the age a little bit. Make sure it's realistic to the type of person they are. For example, with my teacher stereotype, I wouldn't want to H, my character is a 17-year-old, as it is impossible to be a qualified teacher at 17 years of age. So what I want to do is I want you to go ahead now and just think about what h o character my baby. And I want you to write that down. For my character, my heart is going to be 34 years or I'm going to write 34 years out in and then you've got your age as well. So ten a name and an age. And moving on. Booker it birthplace. So if it is, you want to fill in your country of birth. So the country of birth for this character is going to be, I'm just gonna say America, United States of America. And yours might be somewhere else. You'll be Italy for example. Yours might be just America as well. Wherever you live. It doesn't need to be anything crazy. But just thinking about your character might be inside where you where you want it to be from. A marital status. So for marital status, while looking at whether you're your character is currently single for dating someone or if they're married with ARD, et cetera. So for my character here, I'm gonna say that single that I have any one of the tied to or dating or anything like that. So I'm going to say the single. Um, I have some other information like they have just recently come out of in a relationship. So you can add a little bit more detail if you wanted to. For family next, we've got family next now with family. But don't write down whether a character has a mother or father to have any children maybe or maybe they have only cousins have left in their family, or maybe they only have certain types of family members like an honor onco. So you're going to write this information down now. My character, my character only has the father alive. I'm gonna say father alive. Mother passed away. So giving a little bit more detail there. So my character I'm just saying that the father is alive, mother passed away, no children. So I've got a little bit image mention then it tells us a little bit about who this person is. Now, here's details is wherever we are going to fill in, what character physically looks like. For ICBA, how tall they are, the hairstyle, the clothing, what do they look like? I want you to fill in with as much details. You can't put this section here. So you can do that now as I'm going to be doing it with you. So I'm gonna say my character is tall, doc brown eyes. I'm going to also say that my character looks like. They might say that my character wears glasses and a plaid shut. Then I might say that my character has a hunch. I hunched shoulders. Hunched shoulder. Might even give more details about them by saying they look in a secure. So easy, I've given a little bit of details about it, what they look like, a bit more about what they wear. So think about what your character might look like. Again, it's up to you. Whatever you want to decide for them is to her the fine. Next, we're going to look at the occupation, your character. So what does, what does your characters do for a living? Now, if you charge the stereotype that has a job row, that's totally fine to write that down. For example, my stereotype is the teacher. And we gotta think about how we can add more detail to that. Well, the way I'm thinking about doing that is by saying they're a high school teacher. But not only that might want to talk about maybe what subject to actually teach. So I'm going to say there are a high school science teacher. Again, a bit more detail there again. Now, if your character doesn't have a job, at this moment, we can say they're unemployed. Turley said that they don't have a job right now. Maybe onto work experience. So you can think about how long has your character in working. If they have been and had they worked other dogs and other places. So you want to fill in information about their work experience in their life. For my character, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say that my characters were to jobs, that this is a second school of them worked. I had a previous school where that didn't really turn out well for him. So I want you to think about what you could do say for your characters by experience. So characters worked two jobs. Previous job at another school was not good. And then I'll think, might think about what other experiences the character might have had a good work, maybe growing up that have a small part-time job while studying or doing whatever they were doing. So I'm gonna say my character worked at a bakery. Character work at a bakery when he was a teenager. So once you've done that, you're gonna move down to educational background. Have poor educational background. We wanna think about, has our character completed school? Had they gone on to college or university? Have they done a short course online? What have they done to learn and complete the education? And they didn't degree. What was the degree that they did? So I'm going to say that my I'm going to say ma has gone to university to complete a bachelor's degree and teaching minus psi. Given more information, then I might say that Mach and Lee just past is classes. It might just be a little bit more information like that. Might also say that Has he has completed show cause on child management. So we get a bit Mark mentioned about remark is Okay, so maybe go to a hub is for L hobbies. We're going to look at what does your character like to do in their free time and what are they interested in? So in my character likes to go hiking and say, So they go hiking. You know, they say that they Arctic garden. Gardening. And I like to paint the painting. They like painting, creating off. And now we're going on to our legs. So we had our hobbies, now we're going to relax in dislikes as well. So here for these sections we want to feel and what I characterize likes and dislikes, which will help flush out more about the character of LA and the personality, the blacks. It could be anything. Maybe you've had to latch the rate blocks here that maybe is asked to drink coffee. As much detail as you can say with dislikes. Maybe your character, this ice children are waking up early, or vegetables, whatever you can think of that your character would lack and decide to write it down. It is totally up to you. Your character is your RN character. So feel free to make them how you want them to be. So I'm going to fill this out now and fill it out with me as well. So I'm gonna say my character likes working on the page. They all semi like t. Then I might also say that my character lacks dogs. I'm gonna say no task. And obviously that's a really disliked, but I'm running it in there just to tie them with the dogs. And then my last say, say, the, my character likes to read. Now you can be a lot more detail. The noun is doing really basic at the moment. And feel free to use up all the space as much as you like. Yeah, dislikes. I'm gonna say my character is lags, exercise. That is slack, noisy, Paypal. They dislike. Gossip. They might be also dislike. Maybe they also just like ooh, coffee. They dislike coffee, tea like this, like coffee. There we go. So moving on, we're adding some more details. Now. In these sessions when I talk about, I may MI with the statements, but talking about your character. So I want you to write down your answers as if you're thinking about as if you are your character. So the worst part of my life is, so what is the west part of your character's life at the moment? Maybe a map a, that they are stuck in a job they don't like. Maybe is that they feel lonely. Maybe that I have many friends, whatever it is, you just write it down. What the worst part of their life is. It doesn't need to be something major. It could be something as small as having to take public transport to work every day doing this. Now, what is the worst part of your character's life? So the west part of my heart is life is that they stuck in a job and they didn't like. So moving on to looking at my friend's lack me because so think about why would your friends like your character? Might be because you're funny, easily along with or maybe have mutual interests for mutual friend. If it doesn't have any friends, make sure to write that down as well. So go ahead and do that now. So my friends think I'm goofy, silly. Really get close with the friends. Because I feel like the odd one out. Moving on. And take your time, make sure that you pause the video if you need to get back to sections that you want to go back to whenever you need to. Okay, so I get annoyed when Baghdad things that your character will get annoyed with. It could be when someone cuts off ofs driving. It could be when people walk certainly in front of you. It could be when people are like no, you take the time to think about this and write as much or as little as you want. Again, sometimes your character may not get annoyed by a lot or anything at all. So my character gets annoyed. So I get annoyed. When I need to walk walk somewhere. And people will slowly in front of me. I hate that, that's all my character hates. He gets annoyed by that. People won't necessarily in front of him. A character also gets annoyed me children, even though he works with children, it gets annoyed by them. So when they are very lad and bratty, this carrot doesn't like i gets annoyed by that. And moving on, your major accomplishment so far in life is to think about this. It could be something that your card is proud and happy about, that dumb. But it could have been my selling like they've saved someone's life. They graduated high school or fan money on the street. Or they got a raise from whack. Just think about it could be something really small. That's his characters, their major accomplishment because maybe they haven't really accomplished much yet. So think about what have they accomplish? So finite life. So I'm gonna say my characters major accomplishment is that they graduated university and got a degree. Moving on your character's dream. What does your character dream? What do they want to achieve? Who they want to start a family or do they want to get a higher job position in the workplace? But I want to travel around the world. Spend some time now thinking about what your cat is. Dream is my characters dream. So my dream is to spend time with myself and to report. My carrot is very simple. They just wanna spend timeless often, read more. Then I don't really like spending time with many other people. But there must be a reason for that, is thinking about what catalyst dream is. And then finally, we have our final section here. My relationship with other characters or the other character is. So you gotta imagine with this section, we're now going to fill it out. Now. You could fill it out if you wanted to. But this is usually used when you've got the same with another character in it, or another, or a play where you have multiple characters the character interests interacts with. So you'd fill in a section about what your character's relationship is with these other characters that you're in the play with. Right now, we don't have other characters. If you want, you can make up another character and write down what their relationship is with them. For example, might say, well, my character's relationship with their father is like, say that my character's relationship with them is not very good. And am I explain more about that relationship in this section? So you can go ahead if you want and do that now. Otherwise, we will move on with the rest of the class. So I know that was a lot of writing for this lesson. Hopefully, you got something out of it and you know a lot more about your character. In the next lesson, we're going to take our character from the page to the stage, developing a character's voice. I will see that. 5. Create a Voice for Your Character: And thank you for joining us in this next lesson on voice. In the last lesson that we really did develop a CAFTA more now from that stereotypical character that we started with. And now we have a lot more information about who they are and what they believe in. But in this lesson, we're really going to be looking at how we can take our character from that paper, that profile into a voice and a physical person. We will be working on our voice through a couple of exercise. First thing we're gonna do is we're going to do a book, a warm-up, a burka VOIP is important because it allows our voice to be activated and ready to find the spots standing. Or if you're not able to stand, make sure that you're sitting down and you're nice and told. Follow along with my instruction. I want us to stop by yawning. So I want you to stretch. Stretching. Your the even if you don't need to yawn, we're doing this because it allows our body to, I've been up and down boys to open up as well. So it keeps stretching all different ways. That it actually feels really great. Doesn't add to release all that energy through a yawn. Now come back to a still position. For the next Virchow warm up. We're going to do a siren from low all the way up to high and then back down to low again. And we're going to continue going up and down in our vocal register. And we're going to do it on a hum sound. So follow along with me now. If you need to take a breath, make sure you do take a breath, and that's totally fine. And Kip Guy, back to it. Here we go again. Let's do it again. Good job. Now, repeat after me. Says shush. Says SHE, grant, we're going to do it again. Make sure that you really, really use your breath for that. The short and the Shh, shh, shh. Exploring all the air out. So again, repeating after me will do it again. Since SHE says, shush, Excellent. Now we're gonna do a couple of tongue twisters to get our mouth's moving. So I'm going to demonstrate a few of them and I want you to follow along and practice with me. So the first one that we're gonna do is red lorry, yellow lorry. So I want you to practice that a bit now with me. I'm going to practice as well with you. Hey, we got red lorry, yellow Dory, red lorry, yellow lorry. Red lorry, yellow lorry. That was a right, wasn't it? But of course we don't get a bit. So at the moment and we would probably want to speed it up. I'll goes to get it said three times. Really fast, but that stumbling. So let's try it again this time we will speed it up. Not too fast, but we'll spin up a little bit. And we'll see how we go. Here we go again. Red lorry, yellow lorry, brand lorry, yellow lorry. You really feel I'm miles, maybe a little bit more now. But let's try it again. This time. We're going to go a lot pasta. And again, don't worry about it going at the speed that I'm gonna go and want you to go at whatever speed you can go at Hayabusa? Red lorry, yellow lorry regular yellow or red? Laurie. Laurie. How was that? I'm going to give you a chance to go again this time. I won't do it with you. He guy. Yeah, no bad. So good job with that one. Let's go to our next tongue twister. And what we're going to be saying is unique New York. Unique New York. And we're gonna say that three times. And our goal again is to try to get a fast three times in a row without stumbling on outwards. So Let's try it. Unique, New York, unique, New York, unique New York. Now this one is really probably seems simple, but it's quite difficult, especially when you get pasta. So let's try it again. Maybe go. Unique New York, unique New York, unique New York. Had GO without. This time. We're gonna go for as fast as we can. And I went through it with D, I'll let you have a go at it. So here you go. Nice, try. Good job. Don't worry if you struggled with the tongue twisters. I've had time when he keep practicing, you're gonna get better and better. So now that our voices are warm and ready to talk and do whatever we need to for this lesson, we are going to get started on what he on our Boyce. Each character has a particular type of way that they would talk. Everyone is unique and everyone has a certain particular way. Maybe someone talks really, really low all the time because they wanted TO low. Maybe that's just their mood and that's the way they talk or that's why they are developed. But when developing a character, there is no right or wrong. We're here to develop her character and try different things. So what we're gonna do is we're going to explore different ways that we can make a voice sound and see what really could work for our character. For the first exercise, you're going to be talking about a particular topic. And as you're talking, I'll give you a particular cues to help you with the way he should be speaking, the lines, all the dialogue that you're going to be saying, you will now speak as your character for this, again, this is about exploring voice. So we are going to be looking at different ways that you can speak. Ok, let's go with that does prompt. I just want you to think about this prompt. And I want you to talk about this prompt. You to act it out. Scenarios you've been given the highest cream and extremely happy about being given ice cream. I'm going to give you 30 seconds now to do that. How did you go with that? Did you notice how maybe you spoke? Maybe you spoke with a really high happy voice. You will so excited all the time your energy, you had a lot of energy in your voice. So you can see how already we've started to develop a voice with just a prompt like that. Let's try another one. This time. Your prompt is that you've just waking up and you're extremely tired. What are you going to say? Maybe you're going to greet people for the morning. Maybe you taught yourself a mumble to yourself. How would you actually act as out? You have 30 seconds now to work on it. How did that go? Quite different from the first time, right? So you can see how different scenarios and situations can affect the way our voices. We're gonna do one mole this time and it might be a little bit more challenging, but give it a go. What do I need to do is I want you to imagine that you've just waking up and you have your parents yelling at you, telling you really liked was something important. What does your voice sound like now, how would you act that I'll give you 30 seconds to do that. Well done. Hopefully with that exercise, you were able to work out how your voice can actually change depending on the scenarios. It is interesting to think about how a voice can have so many different variations to it. And how we can use that to help develop our characters. We now going to do an exercise working on your character's voice. For this exercise, you're going to act as your character. And you're going to only say three things. You're gonna see a character's name, your characters, age, and what does your character do for work? For example, I might say, I am John Smith. I'm 22 years out, and I am a real estate agent. Check with this exercise is that your voice is going to change depending on the prompt that I give you. So I'm gonna give you different scenarios and prompts that will help heat dictate the way your voice should be. Let's start with the first prompt. You are in a meeting with your boss. If you're unemployed, you're in an interview. Ok, so I'll give you a bit of time now to complete this. Okay? So you might have found that a little bit easy and maybe not as difficult as you thought it would be. Remember, you gotta think about the way your character with ACT will talk in this situation. Are they nervous or are they excited? How would they act with this boss in the room? Let's try the next scenario. Now for this one, you going to be imagining that you've been on hold for 20 minutes. The foreign, and apparently someone picks up and then you speak, even though the dialogue doesn't make sense to the scenario. Still say what we need to say. Again, our name, age, and occupation. But remember to think about how you would say it depending on the scenario. The scenario again, you're been on hold for 20 minutes. And then finally someone picks up and gets to you. How would you actually act and speak? Have agree, now, good job. Your character may have been a bit annoyed. That voice, that may have been very sure, depending on how your character is. Maybe that's how they spoke. But again, there is no right or wrong we're exploring here. Your character might even really gentle and kind and forgiving. And their voice, the way they spoke. Whenever you date, it's great that you're exploring and developing your character's voice right now, we have now looked at two different scenarios on how we can develop a character's voice. We're now going to explore in a deeper sense our character's personality. If you were standing, grabs sate, and carve out some paper and a pen or pencil. We're going to do some theory whack here to just explore and think about our character's voice. Hey, we're going to do a mind map for our character's voice. Start with your character's name in the middle. It's my character is Mach. And it's gonna draw a little clad around him, around the name. And so we're going to cut his name in the middle. So now what I want us, it is I want us to just brainstorm and just start creating ideas for what our characters, natural speaking voice might be like. So it could be that your character talks really fast. It could be that your character has started or maybe they're really energetic. So what do I need to do is I want you to write down some ideas around this bubble that you create around your character's name. So go ahead and do this now with me. So let us write down that my character, socially slave. Am I also say that my character, an idea, maybe their bid, monotone. And I talk in the same sort of style at time. But there really is. Meiosis say that when annoyed. Let's open a really high pitched voice. And then I might also say that my character mock they're speaking voice when they're speaking, sometimes they stumble on their words. So I'm just brainstorming some ideas here again, you don't have to do many more if you wanted to. Just brainstorming different ideas, then what I want us to do once we've brainstormed and written down a few things describing our character's voice. What I want you to do is I'm going to write down underneath each one why that carrot, its voice is like that. Why did you choose that? Why thinking this? Now, you can refer back to your parity profile for information that may help support why a character speaks with certain qualities. So go through your carriage profile to help with information to support why you chose some of these things for you heard his voice. So again, if I chose toaster is certainly a mindset that my character talks clearly because we insert a learn a bit of a Lina, Marina and the board over time. But the job board with job and support it because his dream is to sort of be a learn and to radar and Lee and doesn't really care about a job anymore. He feel like it's stuck in this job. I might say that my character's voice in monitoring doesn't really get any joy from life. From life. And my pay because my character may feel like now joy from life because his mother passed away. So I might say that mother passed away. Why would he talked really high pitched? Well, my character gets annoyed really easily. There might also be because it feels like no one can hear. Then stumble onwards. Might say he stumbles on his words because he's some ozone is words because he was taste. So used to the taste when he was younger. And I've decided that's probably why he stumbles on his words now. Because he's always watching what he says. So you're thinking about different ways and reasons why your character talks in a certain way. There's, this is part of the backstory, is gonna help with building your character up. As long as you have a clear justification for each quarter you're at Daniel mind map, then you're gonna really understand more about your character's voice. So again, this is about brainstorming, exploring different things that are character could do and speak like. Now you should have some understanding of what you think your character's voice should be like. Well done, you have now developed your character's voice more using the information that we have already gathered throughout the previous lessons, we now have a framework that we can work with when performing. In the next lesson, we are going to look at Character Movement. So get ready familiar, and I'll see you there. 6. Create Engaging Movement for Your Character: Welcome back to the next lesson on creating, engaging and believable characters. In the last lesson, we took a character from the page to the stage, throughout voice. But now we need to take the character from the page to the stage throughout physical movement. So in this lesson, we'll be focusing on movement. It would need to make sure that you have some space for this lesson. You will be moving around a bit. So clear a bit of a space. If you don't have much room when you've got an awkward space, just work with what you've got. If you're unable to move. Feel free to just watch this video and take notes throughout. You still apply all the things that we learned in this lesson to any other work that you do. Okay, let's send up in an urn space. Keep your arms. Relax by aside and stand not sum toll in a moment, I'm going to tell you to walk around the room while you'll space, and I want you to follow along with my direction. So go ahead, walk around just space right now. Fill every corner of your room or your space. Make sure you explore in different ways. Don't always just go around in a circle. Maybe you go back and forth. Maybe zig-zag at times will change directions. So as you're moving around the broom, you'll just listen to my voice and you are relaxed walking. Now as you look around the room, I want you to pretend that you're walking on Baia. Imagine the ground is full of fire. How would you book as if you're walking on file? O AD, go around and do that now, imagining how your buddy wouldn't move as if you were walking on file. Still walk around the space. Don't worry about how you would react as if you're walking. But like how would you actually move your legs be doing in odds BY doing something? How would you walk and move around as if the folders and file. Great job. Okay, back to neutral. And let's just walk around normally how you would normally do. So if you're getting about the fire, walk around. If you go back to your normal self. This time, as you walk around, I want you to walk as if you're walking through mud. So do this now is and give me some keys. Do you have to lift your legs? Hi. Do you have to push a bit more as you walk? How would you walk as if you're walking through mud? Remember to explore all areas of your room or your space. Keep going. You're doing great. Explore what that feels like. Excellent. Back to normal. That's walk-around normally. Now, this time when you walk, I want you to walk as if she has lots of fella. How would you book? When you think about you being as light as a feather? Go ahead and do it now. You'll walk and the space as light as a feather. How do you feel inside you? Feeling like you're really up in the air, your Bounce CMO. Keep going and that's it. And viola. So with this exercise, we looked at how our body can move and change through different prompts. And the way we think about how, what he can walk and move around. For example, a character, if it wants to walk as Lies of feta, it might seem like a really happy character that just glides and flirts around different places. Maybe they're innocent. So you can see how you can start to work with a character's movement by just thinking about the way they walk. Let's move on to our next exercise. This one, you're going to walk around this space again. So go ahead and do that now, as I'm talking, walk around and you'll space in a neutral way. You're very relaxed as you're walking around. I'm going to tell you to lead yourself around the brain is certain body parts, okay? First thing I want you to do is I want you to walk around the room leading with your chin. How would you lead every way you guide your chin? How would you walk leading with that? Trying to explore that now, Walker in the room leading with the chin, chin should be the first thing that propels you forward. Next thing I wanted to do is only to lead with your bright Hobart. How would it feel to actually lead around with your by Albert? Try it now. It might feel weird, might feel different, and you might be actually walking in a weird way. But make sure that Elbert is leading you around that room. Next, I want you to leave with just static. Your stomach should be the first thing that propels you forward. Now, how would you walk around this space? Leading with just summing. Again, this is shifting the way you move around the space. You can already start to feel it. Okay. Next one, Briana lead with our left Ni Hao Chu walk around leading within the left knee. Now, be safe when you do this. But walking with your left knee leading the way. And last one lead with your left hip. How would you lead with the left hip? Keep going. That's it. Now, this may have seemed like a little bit of a silly exercise, but this is actually a way for us to develop our characters. Even imagined that there was a character leading with the nerves and the way they walk they leave with then knows. You may think that they're a bit of a snobby character. I think they're better than everyone else. So there are ways that we can use body pods and the way we walk and move to really create out characters further. So this last exercise, we're going to take some time to explore our character that we've been developing. I want you to walk around the room as if you are your character. So go ahead and do that. Now. As you're walking around the space, you all your character. And you're just going to listen to the prompts. I'm gonna give you. Feel free to change the way move. As you listen to my prompts. Look again, this is the bags flooring and changing and developing our ideas. There isn't a right or wrong answers here. Okay? So you're walking around the space as your character l. Keep exploring a space. Now, have a think about what does your character stride like? Did they take really teeny tiny steps? Are there big steps? Or are they more unlike the lax normal side? Feel free again to change things as you go. Try doing really tiny steps does not work for your character. Oh, how about your feet and your feet facing outward? They straight on nor are they facing little bit inward. How would this affect the way your character moves? People can't have space exploring. There's things that I've been talking about already. How about your arms at a wildly flailing around? Or are they quite stiff and rigid? Ways your eyesight and you're looking down, up. What about white? Do you feel like your characters, a heavy character? We're talking about actual weight. Talking about the way they walk. Do they feel like they stomp around a bit? Or are they quite light and airy? How fast does your character walk? They SPD walker? Or did they take that time to get to where they need to go? Jakarta with high-status or lower status. Done. Grab a seat and thank you for joining us in this lesson. Hopefully, you did take some things, add those less than anywhere actually able to, to develop your CAFTA even further. In the next lesson, we're going to look at the class project together and I go into complete it. So I will see that. 7. Class Project: Putting it All Together: Today, in this lesson, we're going to have a little bit of fun now and we get to complete our class project together. So with this project where you're going to be doing is you're going to be creating a performance using your character that you've developed throughout this whole, entire class. So we worked on our character from stereotyped through to their background and their voice and movement. So we're gonna put it all together now in creating our class project set. But this class projects, you're going to create a performance that is about 30 seconds long. It's not going to be too long. You're going to perform and record yourself. Now, if you're not able to record yourself, I would suggest that you do this performance for friends or family. For more details about what you need to do for your performance. I have created a resource, a performance Godfrey source for you. This resource is going to tell you what you need to include in your performance. Simply, you will need to introduce yourself as your character, sermon be UAB character in his performance. Again, looking at the performance guide, it's going to tell you what you need to talk about. So let's take a look at it together now. Okay, so now we're here with our performance guy. Again, you have access to this. They got this width denier and you're gonna follow along with me. We're gonna go through it together. So with this performance God, I want you to use this to help plan and form your project for your idea. So you gonna plan it before you actually do is I want you to take some time finding it and practicing as well. And also feel free to improvise and just look at these as prompts to help you with your performance. So let's look at scenario. A scenario is that you're going to be meeting someone new for the first time and you need to introduce yourself to them. So imagine that you're going to have the scene where you have another character you're going to be talking to. So your character's gonna meet someone new for the first time and you're going to talk to them. Now, you can make up here this other person could be, it could be maybe a boss for new job. It could be a new friend that you make, you're making. It could be a teacher. Think about what situation your character might be n and this other character might be like. Now, we're going to start off by, in your performance, you'll start off by answering the questions below. What is your name on it? Just to simply say what your name is and where you're from. I don't need to say your full name unless the situation that you're creating, the demands that you say your full name and where you're from. Iterated Talk about your country necessarily. It depends on your situation. Again, you are going to create. He may want to just say what city or from or town, or even just say I'm around. I'm from around the corner. Okay, moving on. You go into then choose three of the five prompts below. So only three of these five you're going to choose to answer in your performance. So we've got a five now let's go through them and move on. What do you do for a living? And why? Number two, what do you like to do for fun or Y? Three, what is scared of a wife? For her was your inspiration life from y and five, D prefers summer or winter. And why do you only choose three of those? Three of the five s? Now, what am I answering all these questions in our performance? We're not going to just say one word is, is we want to actually say them in a sentence. We want to send love having a conversation with someone else, this other kept in the same. So when it says, what do you do for a living and why? Not just going to answer a teacher? I'm gonna make it into a sentence to make it like a conversation or digital. I am a teacher. I just want to let you know that because I really, really, really love to share my knowledge. And I was wondering if I could tell you something about my life. See this little example. It's as if I'm talking with someone and having a conversation with them. So that's what we're going to give you a performance. And it might be good to plan this out. And I think about what you might want to say, what your character might be saying. And then finally, when you finish thirds three of the five prompts, you're gonna finish a performance in a closure conversation by making an excuse for why you need to leave. It could be that you're running light. We need to go to the shops. You aboard. We need to go into appointment. Find a way that your character would leave this whole entire conversation. But make it natural. I don't want it to just abruptly, okay, by thinking about how would our character leave this conversation? It could be very simply, was lovely talking to, but I've gotta head off now because I've got something else native guard tree, we need to think about and plan maybe how you want to close this out. So it is really a simple task where you can use some time to plan and deploy your project. So what I want you to do is once you have recorded your video applauding Hey, into this class to share with your fellow classmates. I will be keeping my eye out for all the wonderful work I see you all do. And I encourage you all to check each other's work out as well and to support each other. It can be difficult for people to share their work. But this is a nerve judgment School. And we are all about building each other up to be the best that we can pay. So I look forward to seeing all your amazing work and I'm excited to see the progress you have made. 8. Where to Now: Well, John, on making it through this class. We have done so much work on theory and practical. So excellent job. And I'm glad that you've been working hard throughout his whole, entire class. In the beginning, we started with our stereotypical characters. We then looked at how status can really effect and shape the stereotypes already. And further, we decided to choose one of these characters which we developed a background story about. We worked out who they were, what they believed in. Then we took those beliefs and those ideas of who they were. And we developed an actual physical kept from them using voice and movement to really create out are in characters here. Take all the information in this class to help you with all your character development is really simple to create different characters over time. When you start from a simple stereotype, you can really create interesting and developed and engaging characters from thinking about different stereotypes. But again, we don't want to have a stereotypical character on stage. We want real people. We want develop characters. We want to know who these people are. If you want to further develop your acting, there more bite-sized acting classes available, and there are more being developed. Now, feel free to let me know what you actually want to learn about. I'm open to helping you be the best that you can be in your acting. Makes sure the garden bullet theta school online to be updated on when we release new classes for you. Hopefully you got some useful tools from this class and that you are able to, to develop your skills even further. Take care, and I'll see you in the next class.