How to Form a F Sound for Ventriloquists

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm David O'Donnell and thank you for joining us on Expert Village for this lesson on Ventriloquism 101. In this segment we're going to deal with the letter F. Now I mentioned there are some trouble letters in the English language that automatically create movement in the jaw and lips. So, in ventriloquism we need to combat that. So what we call a phony-phoneme. A phoneme, of course, is just a one sound. What we're going to try and do is create a counterfeit sound that's going to basically--we're going to use to substitute for the letter F because we can't use the letter F. So, take for instance the word free. If I were to say the word free, you can see there it's impossible to do without movement of the lip and jaw. Free. Okay, because air needs to pass through, and there's like an explosion there--it's FREE. So, what we're going to do to replace the F with a phoneme, we're going to use TH from the word think. Okay, so, we're going to use the TH in think, and we're going to substitute it for an F. So what is that going to sound like? Okay, if our word that we want to say is free, then we're going to now start saying three, but first off, very important before we start, when you're saying these words, we know we're replacing it, we know it's not the actual one, but you have to think of the actual word you're saying and try and mold your mouth to say the word you're trying to say, not the word you're replacing it with. Okay, so instead of saying free we're going to say three, but we're going to think free. So watch here we go a few times. Three, three, three, three, three, three, three. As you can see, the more you start to think about it and focus on saying the word free, but actually saying the word three, you see how substitution is a great way to move along in your ventriloquial career."