Accents

Today we had a professional accent coach come in as in Our Country’s Good there is a variety of characters from all around the world. Our Country’s Good doesn’t have extravagant set and is highly focused around the strength of the actors acting. As a result of this I think that it was important to have these accent master classes to not only work on our voices but to also connect to the character more.

For my character I had to work on my RP accent as I am playing a high ranking officer. Although the accent was one that I was most comfortable with we found that making small changes to our mouths had a large effect on our voices. For example we did an exercise where we said all our lines with our lips rounded, although the sound became a very stereotypical RP it allowed us to get the sound at the front of our mouths. This was really useful as with RP the sounds had to come from the front of the mouth so that it is sharper and more articulate. We also found that certain letters were pronounced differently, for example when saying plurals the “s” turns to a “z”. Small changes like this seemed to make a huge difference to my characters accent and it really highlighted the status of the character.

 
I found the accent work really useful for my character work as it emphasised the status of my character. The accent shows that my character has been highly educated which contextually is a sign of wealth. This is supported as my characters profession is legal and is very book smart, I feel that the accent emphasises his intelligence and his power and status.