Parami University students have started their new year with something impactful for their community. This January, the Parami Voice Acting Club (VAC) held its first voice acting workshop with over 30 high school students aged 13-15 from Phaung Daw Oo monastic school in Mandalay.
The objectives of the voice acting workshop, as explained by the club, are to allow high school students to learn about the importance of voice acting and discover their capability through voice acting.
“Our underlying goal is to share our experience and let them [high school students] craft their own opportunities, and we are in a position to craft what’s fit for them,” said Khaing Thazin Phyoe, a Parami sophomore student who serves as the vice president of the Voice Acting club.
The Voice Acting club members are motivated to transfer their knowledge and educate young people about the critical role of voice acting in raising social change awareness in a more creative and engaging way.
Khaing described the workshop as an important step in expanding the impact of the club’s activity. “The workshop aimed to introduce young people to voice acting, attain ideas on using their voices properly, and explore available career opportunities in voice acting. We offered the workshop to the high school students as they are at the peak of their curiosity and are willing to explore and discover their capabilities. If we want to make a change, we must start from the root: educating and empowering young people to become change agents in their community. We seemed to hit our jackpot with our first-ever workshop. The participants were lively and eager to see the world through voice acting.”― Khaing
The workshop allowed participants to actively engage in various hands-on activities, such as roleplay scenarios, voice categorization, and demonstration of awareness of using voices for different purposes.
A first-year student, Myint Myat, joined the Voice Acting Club as a treasurer and a part of the planning and organizing of the workshop in Mandalay shared that participants expressed their appreciation of learning the importance of voice acting in everyday interaction and for their future career path.
The club has donated microphones to the school for the students to use for creative broadcasts in the school community while trying to apply the knowledge they attained from the workshop in real life.
Myint Myat explained their club's concept as educating, engaging, inspiring, and expanding reach. “We hope to collaborate with the workshop participants to create a podcast on educational topics. We also aim to provide more of this voice acting club workshop in different communities in the future.” ―Myint Myat
Founded and led by undergraduate students at Parami University, the Voice Acting club now has 11 members with a talent for voice acting. The Voice Acting club’s projects include a broad spectrum of the art of voice acting, such as crafting the voices of all members and contributing to the University's advertisement and other announcements/ projects. The club has already organized two voice donation events to the school for the visually impaired in Yangon. All members of the club have a great opportunity to work on voices, accents, and pronunciation while slowly working towards becoming professional voice actors/vocal coaches and having fun at the same time.