Feedback After Using My Monologue

My monologue had good energy and change of voice when my character was quoting other characters speech.

To further improve my voice for this monologue I am going to look into intonation and how it can help me improve my monologue further.

Improving my Intonation - would help me in my monologue as it would add more attention to certain words and sayings my character says this will also help to show how she feels more emotion towards different aspects of the monologue.

creating my character's voice

As I'm a young girl my voice will be a sweeter tone to my actual voice and i will also need to over and under pronounce certain words to get across the importance my character feels on stressing certain words.

Arsehammers and Voice

By the time we get to the home I have decided it is defiantly a sad day. Mam has made egg sandwiches, which I hate, and cheese sandwiches, which I hate even more than egg, and Claudia has been sick down her dress.

However, I feel a lot happier when we go inside granddad’s new home. Lots of other grandmas and granddads live here. And granddad’s room is a lot bigger than his old one and it has a television and a button he can press if he wants ‘assistance’. The lady smiles a lot and seems nice, so I ask if all the other grandmas and granddads have Arsehammers. She says, ‘Yes this is a special home with lots of experts who try to make things better for your granddad and all the others like him.’

I am over the moon. It suddenly all makes sense to me. Granddad isn’t being put in a home. Granddad is going to help save the world! Granddad is even more of a hero than he was before. Experts. Experts are going to train granddad and all the other people with Arsehammers to transport themselves to proper places, planned places, where they can suddenly turn up and over throw dastardly villains and listen in to secret spy conversations, and generally go where no man has gone before, and suddenly appear and say ‘Boo’ and frighten the life out of the most hardened of criminals. I laugh, I am happy, I think granddad will be happy here too.

Mam is upset, though. In the car going home she cries. Claudia and I pretend not to notice but she cries a lot. When she stops crying and is just snuffling Claudia asks why granddad isn’t coming home with us. Mam is quite for a minute or two before she turns around to explain to Claudia that granddad has a disease of the brain, which makes him very poorly and confused, so that he forgets where he is, where he is going, who he is and who mam and dad and me and Claudia are, and that he has to stay in that special home because he will get worse and worse. And then mam starts crying again. I sulk the rest of the way home.

The next morning mam tells me that granddad has died peacefully in the night. She tells Claudia that granddad has gone to live with the angels.

Later that afternoon I tell Claudia that there are no such things as angles and granddad has simply Arsehammed his way back to live with grandma.

Underlined word/phrases are over excaudate to stress the importance of the characters attitude and awareness of what she is saying.

After underlining the words and phrases that need to be said in an excaudate way, I thought of how I could develop further and decided to re go over the monologue and highlight to show how the character may have used their voice to show her emotions:

Louder happiness

Quitter sadness

Faster pace excitement

Louder complaining

Supporting and reassuring

My Monologue from Arsehammers

By the time we get to the home I have decided it is defiantly a sad day. Mam has made egg sandwiches, which I have, and cheese sandwiches, which I hate even more than egg, and Claudia has been sick down her dress.

 However, I feel a lot happier when we go inside granddad’s new home. Lots of other grandmas and granddads live here. And granddad’s room is a lot bigger than his old one and it has a television and a button he can press if he wants ‘assistance’. The lady smiles a lot and seems nice, so I ask if all the other grandmas and granddads have Arsehammers. She says, ‘Yes this is a special home with lots of experts who try to make things better for your granddad and all the others like him.’I am over the moon. It suddenly all makes sense to me. Granddad isn’t being put in a home. Granddad is going to help save the world! Granddad is even more of a hero than he was before. Experts. Experts are going to train granddad and all the other people with Arsehammers to transport themselves to proper places, planned places, where they can suddenly turn up and over throw dastardly villains and listen in to secret spy conversations, and generally go where no man has gone before, and suddenly appear and say ‘Boo’ and frighten the life of the most hardened of criminals. I laugh, I am happy, I think granddad will be happy here too.

Mam is upset, though. In the car going home she cries. Claudia and I pretend not to notice but she cries a lot. When she stops crying and is just snuffling Claudia asks why granddad isn’t coming home with us. Mam is quite for a minute or two before she turns around to explain to Claudia that granddad has a disease of the brain, which makes him very poorly and confused, so that he forgets where he is, where he is going, who he is and who mam and dad and me and Claudia are, and that he has to stay in that special home because he will get worse and worse. And then mam starts crying again. I sulk the rest of the way home.

The next morning mam tells me that granddad has died peacefully in the night. She tells Claudia that granddad has gone to live with the angels. Later that afternoon I tell Claudia that there are no such things as angles and granddad has simply Arsehammed his way back to live with grandma.

The different colours represent what type of staging and how I am performing the parts of the monologue:

green - this text highlighted shows that my character sat in the car on the way to the home and also on the way back from the home I can show this by sitting in a chair but to make my character more realistic as a child I could be pulling on the seat belt witch would be over my shoulder making sure not to lead the audience away from the dialogue.
yellow - the text in yellow is when we are walking around the home and my character also goes off into their imagination to why her granddad is going into the home this can be made more presentable by pacing myself and stopping to observe the new scenes that the monologue describes.
pink - the pink text my character is reflecting on her own experience and trying to tell her sister the truth about death but also telling her sister what she hopes has happened this can be staged just at on the floor to show they are children and that my character still doesn’t understand.

Physically and Mentally What Can Go Wrong

Mentally:
If you are not focused or are finding it hard to link to the emotions or the character then this can affect your voice as the tone wont match up to the emotion in the dialogue.

physically:
IF YOU SMOKE-
Smoking causes about 90% of lung cancers.
It also causes cancer in many other parts of the body, such as the:

• mouth
• lips
• throat
• voice box (larynx)

sorced infomation from http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/2344.aspx?CategoryID=53&SubCategoryID=536

This in turn will affect your voice and the ranges of witch your voice can perform. smoking also creates a layer on your throat making some vocal techniques more difficult to perform than non smokers. smoking makes you breathless this will stop you range of speech as you will need more pauses for breaths that a non smoker with stronger lungs.

IF YOU DRINKING ALCOHOL-

Mucous

You might think that because the vocal folds are covered by mucous membrane - similar to the tissue of the inside of your mouth - that mucous would help you sing. Unfortunately, abnormal mucous production occasioned by alcohol consumption only reduces vocal fold flexibility and increases the need to clear your throat. Alcohol irritates and dehydrates the vocal folds as well as the rest of the body. To protect itself, the body produces mucous much in the same way as it would deal with an allergic reaction.

sorced from http://www.jeanniedeva.com/page/946235 

Developing a Character from a Monologue

About the monologue

In Arsehammers a young boy mishears his parents discussing his Granddad’s Alzheimer's in whispered voices and thinks the secrecy means it must be a rude word! He then goes off on a flight of fancy, imagining his granddad as a Superhero with magic powers. His theories all seem to fit in with his Granddad’s true predicament.

Developing a character from the monologue

To develop this monologue I have changed the gender of the character making it a young girl. The monologue tells me that she has been living with her mother, farther, sister and additional granddad since her grandmother passed away, she has grown to understand that even though her mother told her different there are no such thing as angles and that her grandma is just simply dead. Her younger sister is called Claudia and she has a very close relationship with her granddad and this leaves her confused on whether she is happy or sad that her granddad is going into a home. Near the end she also tells her younger sister that angles don't exist.

key points

• Girl around 7 years of age
• Understands her grandmothers death
• Unsettled emotions over her grandads condition (alzheimer's)
• Unsure of the actions that follow her grandads illness

Different Areas Of The Mouth

Practice these statments to improve different areas of your mouth.

The Lips
Pass the pens and pencils please.
You loose too many shoes.
I bought a book about a boy who became a prince.
Wild winds and wet weather.

 The Tongue
Leave the lazy lion alone.
The butler stopped to eat a toffee.
Quick, catch and kick the ball.
He didn’t want to admit that the leader was right.


The Soft Palate and Back of Tongue
I’m pulling a long length of string.
More wagons making mud.
In the spring the birds are singing and the donkeys braying.
Imagine mending the old thing.He’s getting the grey gold clubs.


infomation from

https://srcportal.stockton.ac.uk/subjects/perfarts/Classes/pa0005/Unit%2017%20%20Developing%20Voice%20for%20the%20Actor/Week%201/Vocal%20Exercises%20-%20Warm-up%20Pieces.pdf