Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Weekly Obsession Wednesday - I Just Want A Scottish Accent! And Other Cool Stuff

Hello all! Here are the obsessions for the week. I just realized they all have a European flavor this week.

#3 James Bay's Chaos and Calm Album

It seems like my mom has been talking about James Bay for forever. She just loves his music. So when his full length album was released I had to give it a listen. This album just makes me happy. I suppose it's because the song just have a positive feel. I also think the title of the album "Chaos and Calm" is appropriate. James Bay's music is both instrumentally interesting and calming all at once. Plus, he is one of those people that sings with wonderful emotion and style. I love it!




#2 Emma BBC Mini-Series














I was chatting on twitter with Vienna who has a book blog called It's A Books World. She highly suggested that I watch the 2009 Mini-Series version of Emma. I have been meaning to watch it of a while, but her suggestion got the fire under me to finally get around to watching it. It was awesome! I still haven't read the book yet, so I can't really compare it to the novel. (I know I need to read more Austen. Please don't hurt me Austen fans.) However, regardless of that fact I thought it was a very well written Mini-Series. The actors were perfectly cast and amazing. Add to all that the sets and costumes and sets were jaw-droppingly beautiful. The camera works is lovely too. Oh, I just adored it.
 
#1 Practicing Accents

I've been very interested in practicing doing accents. Mostly because if I do a reading for my book reviews and that book is set in a different country or contains a character from a different country I like to do my best to perform it in that accent. If in fact my accent isn't too terrible. Also it's a good idea for an actor to practice those things just in case. I live in the south so the southern accent isn't much of a task. I'm fairly decent at the British, Cockney, and Irish. So I've been practicing those. I was actually in a play where I had a dialect coach to teach us how to do those accents better. So just had to review those sounds. I'm better at Cockney and Irish though.

The  accents I would like to learn the most are Scottish and Australian. I've always had a difficult time with those. I decided to try to work on the Scottish accent first. Which meant watching a lot of YouTube videos and trying to listen to the accent a lot. It's accent that is hard for me because I keep wanting to slip into my Irish accent. In the Scottish accent you don't really pronounce your T sounds. The singer in my revolts at the idea of doing that. Haha! It's still a lovely accent that I desperately want to get better at. However, all this practice did have a price. I went through a whole two days where I couldn't stop rolling my R sounds or taking in a accent of some kind when I wasn't think about it. It cracked my ballet teacher up. I literally had to think about talking like an American for a day. Haha!

While in my accent search I found the videos by YouTuber Awesome Alana. She makes the most amusing/hilarious accent videos.


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