The proper way to breathe as a voice actor (or singer) is to intentionally use your diaphragm. Every time you breathe, you use your diaphragm. The difference here is to learn to control your diaphragm to maximize your voice control. Learning how to control your breath by using your diaphragm will help make you sound natural, giving you the ability to read through complete phrases without losing stamina for longer narration reads.
How to take a diaphragm breath intentionally:
1. Raise your arms up over your head and lower them gently while keeping your ribs raised. This isn’t needed to take a diaphragm breath but helps pre-set your body when you’re learning how to do it properly.
2. With your hands slightly above your waist position your finger tips so they’re towards your belly button and your thumbs on your back. Also, not needed to take a diaphragm breath but it will be a good indicator if you’re doing it correctly.
3. Once your hands are in place and your ribs are raised, then focus on taking a low, deep breath. This will feel more like a “filling up like a balloon” sensation, or a downward motion, instead of filling your lungs up with air. When you take this breath, make sure that your shoulders do not move up. In actuality, your stomach should move OUT when you INHALE and move IN when you EXHALE. This is very similar to how a baby’s stomach moves while it is sleeping.
4. In addition to seeing your stomach move and feeling the motion on your finger tips, you should also feel a slight movement in the palms of your hands as your entire diaphragm is moving outward. If you were to study your body while you’re taking a proper breath, the front, sides and back of your lower torso should be moving with each breath that you take.
Here are a some exercises by our professionals at Child Actor LA, that you can practice to help learn how to breathe with your diaphragm:
a) While sitting, place your legs together in front of you and bend over on top of yourself so that you’re basically reaching down to touch the floor. Place your arms at your side so they’re not really involved. When you take in a low, deep breath you should feel your stomach moving against your legs.
b) Lay down flat on your back with your hands placed on your stomach. Then relax and take a low, deep breath. You should see your stomach moving UP when you INHALE and DOWN when you EXHALE. You should also feel the movement in your hands, which is a great indicator if you’re doing this correctly.
c) A third exercise is to lie face down on a large ball and curl your body over it with your arms hanging around the ball, like you’re hugging it. You should position yourself so that your stomach is primarily making contact with the ball, not your chest. Then take a low, deep breath and focus on feeling your stomach move outward against the ball when you inhale.
In addition to having a proper diaphragm breath, it is also important to decide WHERE in the script you’re going to breathe so that it sounds natural. You should mark up your script ahead of time so that you’re breathing in appropriate places to avoid sounding like you’re running out of air. Make sure you keep in mind natural phrasing, conversational pauses, etc.
To mark your script in notating a breath, you can use a mid-air comma (like a musical breath notation), a dash like this | between the words you want to breathe or a / mark, or you can even draw phrase marks over the words you want to make sure NOT to break the flow with so that you don’t accidentally breathe in between them. As far as notations go, do whatever works best for you!
So grab some copy, a pencil and remember to breathe.