I live in a town of seven thousand people that has four dancing schools and an amateur theatre team.
The theatre team is sponsored by the municipality and they have a class every week. I attended one such class some time ago, and the teacher, Loukia, made us experiment with the pitch of the voice. She had us read texts with a low, deep voice and then with a high voice to show us that deep can sound menacing whereas high can sound mourning. Needless to say, this was only a small introduction to the huge issue of how to speak, which is of paramount importance for actors.
The dancing schools put up shows at the end of each year. During these shows, there’s usually an unseen speaker (he’s not on stage—he’s usually sitting next to the sound engineer) who holds the mic and reads the programme or announces the entries or reads the story of the ballet. Sometimes the speakers are adolescents and they read pretty badly, but the truth is, adults don’t do much better.
One evening, in one of these shows, the speaker just read the damn thing naturally. “At last,” I said to myself, “someone who can read a piece of text like a human!” I turned to look at the sound engineer’s table and I saw, you guessed it, Loukia.
Even if the task looks trivial, sometimes you need a professional.
If you want to build a good web application, you need a user experience designer, a user interface designer, an HTML/CSS developer, a front-end developer, and a back-end developer. Some people claim to do all these things, and they’re called “full-stack developers”. However such a thing doesn’t really exist. I often work on the full stack, but I don’t claim to be a full stack developer.
We don’t always get a specialized professional to do the task for us—we have constraints and we try to balance things out. A general practitioner might not know exactly what the patch on our skin is, but he can often tell that it’s not something to worry about. In fact, for many patches on our skin, we make the judgement ourselves. It can be hard to know where to draw the line.