シャドーイング練習: Seth MacFarlane Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ - 動画で英語スピーキングを学ぶ

レッスンを作成中...
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There's a pomposity to film sets.
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Yeah, get them into the works.
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Like, what does that mean?
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Oh, hair and makeup.
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Yeah, they're traveling.
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Copy that.
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Copy that.
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No, you're not in the military.
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You're not in the army. That 10-1.
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10-1 is going to the bathroom.
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Say I'm going to the bathroom.
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I got to go to the bathroom.
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It's no shame in that.
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We all do it.
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Hi, I'm Seth MacFarlane, and these are my iconic characters.
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Family Guy.
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Life of Larry was a student film that I had done at the Rhode Island School of Design, and I had conceived that to be a pilot that would get me to Hollywood.
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Hanna-Barbera saw that film and gave me a job.
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Worked on a show called Johnny Bravo.
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Worked on a show called Dexter's Lab, Cow and Chicken.
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Did a pitch for a prime time animated series called Family Guy.
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Developed it while I was at Hanna-Barbera slash Cartoon Network.
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Came to the attention of Fox.
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Pitched the show.
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They gave me like a $40,000 budget to do the pilot, which meant I pretty much had to do it by hand.
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So I spent six months doing that.
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And that eventually became Family Guy.
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Oh, you got some pie, eh?
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Can I have a piece?
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Uh, sure.
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Oh, let me have some of that cool whip.
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What'd you say?
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You can't have a pie without cool whip.
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Cool whip?
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Cool whip, yeah.
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You mean cool whip?
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Yeah, cool whip.
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Who are the Griffins?
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Well, I'm not sure who they are now, but when I was there, the family was always designed to be a very region-specific...
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I had just graduated from college in Providence, and so I was very familiar with that region.
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It was in many ways like a mini Boston.
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The dialect was more or less the same.
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It's a ridiculous part of the country in a lot of ways.
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The dialect is, and you know, I have members of my family who have it, but it's hilarious when employed in the interest of comedy.
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These characters were, they all came from different places.
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I mean, Peter and Brian were very much vaudevillian opposites of each other.
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Peter, you might be underestimating the difficulty of writing a comic strip.
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As someone who occasionally dates the creative muse, I can vouch for the unforgiving face of a blank sheet of paper.
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In fact, I think it was William Faulkner who said, I'm back.
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I'm published.
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Check it out.
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Lois began very much as an avatar for my aunt.
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She became something very different, mostly thanks to Alex Borstein.
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You know, Meg and Chris are the quintessential animated kids.
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Stewie was Rex Harrison, the character actor from the 1960s and 50s and 60s.
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It was Henry Higgins.
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There, there, there.
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Who's hurting you, you silly girl?
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What you take me for?
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I thought this was going to be a lawn party.
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I don't have one pair of long pants.
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Generally for me the voices came first.
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Peter was a mixture of a lot of different, you know, voices.
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There was a security guard that worked at the Rhode Island School of Design who had this really, really thick, really expressive Rhode Island accent.
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Boy, you guys are not sucking me into the story at all.
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I'm just telling you for your own benefit, I'm very aware that I'm watching a play right now.
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Quagmire started off as a throwback to this, you know, this guy whose house looked like something out of a Peter Sellers movie.
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That voice kind of came from me listening to old radio dramas from the 50s.
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There was a bookstore in my hometown when I was a kid, and you could go in and they sold audio tapes.
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Things like The Lone Ranger, Suspense, or The Shadow.
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The commercials were just so absurd and just, you know, everybody talk like this.
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It was just, you know, that sort of mid-Atlantic, I guess, existed right in the pocket that the microphones of that time could handle.
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The low end wasn't there yet, and so it was all about mid-range.
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Oh.
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Hey.
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Uh, didn't think I'd see anyone I knew here.
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There's no Daniel Day-Lewis process that goes on here with these kids.
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It's not that deep.
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There are certain facial contortions that, you know, you do Steele and this happens, I do Peter and this happens.
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It's a little bit of that.
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I've been doing all those characters for so long that it really is just a, it's like turning one light off and another one on.
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Where did the inspiration to do animation come from?
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I mean, all those things were influences.
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All in the Family was an influence.
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The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, obviously.
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What Disney was doing at the time was a huge influence.
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When I was in college, Disney was kind of having its second golden age with Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin and those movies.
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and everyone in our film department, in the animation division, kind of saw that as the ultimate goal.
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To work for Disney would be, you know, and now technically I do.
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So that was kind of what I was really striving for.
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I was doing stand-up at the same time.
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The Simpsons started to take off, and that altered my trajectory because I was really loving doing stand-up,
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but obviously it wasn't the kind of comedy I'd be doing if I worked for Disney.
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I started to kind of rethink things, and thought, they've kind of rewritten the rule book.
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Suddenly I'm watching a cartoon that actually is making me laugh.
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It's for me, as an adult.
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This changes the game.
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The kind of humor that makes me laugh, and the stuff that I was doing in my stand-up routines, could now maybe meld with animation.
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And so that show was instrumental in altering my trajectory.
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And I'm sure the trajectories of a lot of other people who are in the business.
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I mean, you know, from King of the Hill to Bob's Burgers to South Park, you know, all those shows owe their existence,
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I think, and in many ways their stylistic paradigm to The Simpsons.
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The thing I liked about animation was
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that it gave me the chance to explore a lot of different art forms
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that interested me and had interested me throughout the course of my life all in one package.
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Animation is, I don't know that any other medium can really say that.
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It's visual art, it's performance art, the voiceover, it's writing, and it's music.
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All of those things exist in this one package.
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There's always a different art form to play with in that medium.
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That's what excited me the most.
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Time to terrorize the terrorists.
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Ugh, you prepared catchphrases for yourself?
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No, not necessarily.
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To me, the catchphrases are the least interesting things.
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They kind of find you as opposed to the reverse.
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There was a guy I worked with at Hanna-Barbera.
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He was a very business-minded writer.
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And he said, you know, never underestimate the importance of a catchphrase.
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It is something that really makes a difference.
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It's not something that I set out to do.
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Like, you do it, people laugh at the table read, so you add it in next week, and then suddenly you have a catchphrase.
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Honey, your hands are filthy.
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Go wash up for lunch.
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Eat my shorts.
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Eat my shorts.
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I love that.
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Is that a popular expression?
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Like, what the deuce?
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Probably more popular.
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Probably way more popular.
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A stand-up comic friend of mine named Steve Marmel, I guess he was a Jerry Lewis fan or something.
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You know, he would say, hey, Guggen.
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I'd be like, oh, Guggen.
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And, you know, so it devolved into this giggity-giggity,
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this kind of lazy just distilling of Jerry Lewis nonsense sense that then became Giggity, Giggity, Giggity.
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They come from weird places.
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Giggity.
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Ted.
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Ted was conceived as, actually as an animated series.
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It was the same idea.
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It was a guy who had had a teddy bear who had come to life when he was a kid, and now he still had to deal with it.
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The thing was still around.
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But now, he had a wife and kids, and there was a whole family component.
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I kind of went out the window when we had the thought of maybe doing this as a film.
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I had thought at one point, is this a hand puppet thing?
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Is it like a Greg the Bunny sort of situation?
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I wrote the initial story and then co-wrote the screenplay with Alex Sulkin and Wellesley Wilde.
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I think we pitched it to 20th Century Fox.
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They asked us, can you do a PG-13 version?
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So we went, we wrote a PG-13 version.
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I think at the end of the day, they just felt like this is just too expensive.
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It's too weird.
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It's too risky.
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There's a CGI bear at the center.
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This is going to cost a lot of money, which they weren't wrong.
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So we took it to Universal, who luckily wanted to do it and wanted to do the R-rated version.
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You're in one room with a bunch of suits who don't see it, and another room with a bunch of suits who do.
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Luckily, we landed in the right room.
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It was a pretty simple story in a lot of ways.
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It was something that came out, obviously, my background in animation.
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But there was a movie called Alien Nation with Mandy Patinkin that was about an alien invasion, but it actually took place five years after the aliens had invaded.
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So now they're like, we all kind of work together.
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And that was oddly an influence when it came to Ted.
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It's like, OK, well, we all know the magical fairytale story of the thing that comes to life.
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What's the story that takes place 30 years later?
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And the Muppets were a big influence.
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What I always loved about the Muppets is that there was no gimmick.
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There was never any, the animals can talk, but only this, they can only talk to each other.
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I think the second Muppet movie opened with Kermit and Fozzie are working at a newspaper.
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The world you've created is the world where these things can talk, and they're part of our community.
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It's not, oh my god, that frog can talk.
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It's, that frog just cut me off in traffic.
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If you look at a movie like Ghostbusters, it's like you get one crazy out there thing, and everything else has to be really real.
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And their thing was, OK, there are ghosts running around Manhattan.
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Everything else has to be grounded.
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It's New York City as we know it.
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These guys are basically bug exterminators who happen to catch ghosts.
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Everything else about that world is real, except for this one thing.
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If the teddy bear has come to life, everything else has to be really grounded and normal.
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Like, this is not a fantasy world we're living in.
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This is Boston.
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It's two guys sitting on the couch talking about absolutely inconsequential stuff.
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I mean, but do you think she might be expecting me to make that kind of a move?
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No, no, I don't think she's...
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And not only that, it's the wrong time.
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It's a terrible idea.
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I mean, you got the economy, you got the credit bubble, the Supreme Court.
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I mean, look at Haiti.
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I guess I didn't think about that.
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Well, that's a fact.
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I mean, it's interesting.
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We're doing a TED series now for Peacock.
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And initially it's like, all right, this is a 22-minute series.
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To do these moments that have nothing to do with the story, but are just real asides that are so much a part of what the movie was,
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we're having to kind of rethink how we're doing this, how we structure it.
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It's one of those things in comedy that's strange, is that things that don't move the story forward are not always things you want to pull out.
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It illustrates who these people are and not what situation they're in at the moment.
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American Dad.
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American Dad was a direct response to the political climate at the time.
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You know, it was immediate post-9-11.
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The terrorists are everywhere and be on alert.
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And, you know, that was Stan's whole character.
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I don't know if I can stand watch all night.
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You've kept me up for the past two days practicing singing.
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Steve, this is an opportunity to step up and be a hero and be a hero.
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Then you'll know what it takes to really sing our national anthem.
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Radio me if you have any problems.
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I'll do my best, Dad.
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I want more than your best, Steve.
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For once, I want you to do fine.
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Roger was, it was the damage that comes with having that job.
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Like, I gotta house an alien.
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You guys thought I tried to kill you?
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Hilarious!
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It's so therapeutic to laugh.
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You know, we wouldn't have created that show if Family Guy hadn't been canceled.
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I didn't set out to create two animated shows and have them.
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I'm very much somebody who likes to work on one thing at a time, see it through to the finish, and then start on something else.
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They were all in the same building.
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I was running back and forth all day, every day, dealing with these two shows.
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And I didn't really feel like I was really running either one.
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And so I made the choice to delegate it to Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman, who I'd co-created it with,
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and go back and continue nurturing Family Guy because we hadn't been back from cancellation all that long.
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In many ways, I'm surprised.
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When I talk to people in their 20s today, they almost know more about it than I do.
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How to keep it fresh is always the concern.
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I mean, I'm not in the writer's room.
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I haven't been in the writer's room for about 10 years.
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Do you have a favorite character?
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I don't really have, I mean, at this stage, Brian is the easiest character to voice.
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Stewie certainly is at the top of that list.
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Whatever was in my head that day was still paying for my house.
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But, you know, I look at a character like Roger, and that character is kind of mushroomed into something very different, probably not what I would have done, but people love it.
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There's no word to describe it.
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Shmoobly dong?
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That's not it, but it's close.
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You can create a character, but other writers might be able to do something more interesting with it.
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And I think you see that all over television.
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Brian and Stewie is a good example.
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There's a writer, Gary Gennetti, and the Brian-Stewie relationship, which is now so central to that show, was something that he really hit upon.
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It can be good and bad to have a show go this long.
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I think Family Guy in a lot of ways has consistent ups and downs.
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I'm not going to be the one to kill it at this point.
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A million ways to die in the West.
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I mean, every Western we've ever seen centers around some paragon of nobility and heroism.
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And most of us aren't like that.
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Most of us are not in the gladiatorial arena.
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We're going like, look at that guy's haircut, huh?
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That's never who the movie's about.
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And that's who the Million Ways to Die in the West was about.
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It was about the person who has a strong sense of self-preservation, as most of us do.
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What is there to live for on the frontier in 1882?
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Huh?
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Let me tell you something.
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We live in a terrible place and time.
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The American West is a disgusting, awful, dirty, dangerous place.
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Look around you.
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Everything out here that's not you wants to kill you.
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Outlaws, angry drunk people, scorned hookers, hungry animals, diseases, major and minor injuries, Indians, the weather.
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You can get killed just going to the bathroom.
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I take my life in my hands every time I walk out to my outhouse.
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The West is so glamorized, it's so romanticized.
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It would have been terrible to live there.
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You know, there's like probably one restaurant, you probably live miles and miles and miles away from town.
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You gotta ride a horse to get there, even when you do.
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There's not that much to do.
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You can go into the saloon, but it's full of assholes, you know, who are there drinking in the middle of the day.
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Probably no ice.
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But you go home and then you just wait for it to get dark and read the Bible.
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Like, what?
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There's nothing to do.
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But Hollywood has been telling us for years, oh, it's this glorious, romantic, epic era in history.
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And again, we were just trying to take a spin something familiar that hadn't really been explored before.
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When I did TED, that was my first foray into live action ever.
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I mean, I'd come out of animation where you plan everything, every shot, you storyboard everything.
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You can't do coverage.
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You can't have a wide shot and a tight shot and an over.
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And I had, in my mind, and sometimes on paper, storyboarded every scene, thinking, all right, we need this shot and this shot, and that's it, moving on.
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And my producer really had had to explain to me
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that you should probably get some other angles in case you want to mess with it in post.
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And I scoffed at it at the time.
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I had done nothing but animation.
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I mean, I was asking my director of photography quietly, what's an over, what's a 50-50?
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These terms that as a director, like, hey, you should probably know.
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It was a smart crew, and it was an experienced crew.
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And they knew that I was very green, but they also knew that I had a clear sense of what I wanted this to be
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and that I was ready to accept help.
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As far as the on-camera part of it, Ted itself was not that much of a departure from animation.
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It was, you know, the physicality was the same as that you do in the booth when you're recording an animated character.
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The Western was easily the most challenging transition because it's a little more dishonest voiceover work.
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When you're on camera, it's just, there's less of that.
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It has to be, it's so much more nuanced.
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In many ways, it was about pulling back.
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To this day, it is.
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Even with the Orville, it's about pulling back.
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It's about you don't have to give as much, that less is more.
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The Orville.
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With The Orville, I really wanted to, I've been a fan of sci-fi since I was a kid.
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I love that genre of storytelling.
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The thing that you can do as a writer where you're commenting on something without actually commenting on it, you can take a stance, the popular stance or an unpopular stance,
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and tell it through the lens of this alien culture and explore alternative viewpoints.
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It's a lot headier when you're working in that genre, and I really wanted to take advantage of that.
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The sequel began as something that was kind of existing between two worlds.
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I think I found pretty early on that I was much more attracted to one world than the other, that I didn't mind, you know,
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writing the jokes, but I really wanted to tell the sci-fi stories.
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About midway through season two, or maybe a little earlier, and certainly in season three, which is coming up in June,
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we kind of cracked the nut of like, okay, there is a humorous component to this there is a loose component
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but the humor is much more character based you know
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if you're watching ally mcbeal you know
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if you're watching gilmore girls the humor comes from who the people are
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and not from the hard jokes that you would get from a sitcom let me see that shoulder
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does it hurt yeah it hurts like hell that means it's not
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that bad what are you talking about kelly i literally just said it hurts like hell
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when he's really in pain he gets straight answers with no
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cussing he's just hoping you can give him drugs that's a
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bunch of crap kelly i'm in real pain here i why
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do you have drugs similar to albert i wanted ed to
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be somebody who was a little bit more like somebody who
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might be watching a show like this as opposed to being
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in it you know i watch it i watch a picard
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and i'm a fan but i don't i can't relate to picard
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because that's not what i would do in
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that scenario i'd probably like yeah call me when it's over i've written
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that character in sync with how my my own journey has
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felt to me this ship is what i've been waiting for my entire career.
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I've gotten more comfortable being on camera, I've gotten more comfortable directing, more comfortable with the world of live-action filmmaking,
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and I've tried to kind of translate that into the character so the character evolves.
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He becomes more comfortable in his job, he's a little bit more settled into his chair.
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It's a character that is very different as we go from season to season than he was early on, which is kind of a first.
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With the animated shows, people just stay the same, they're frozen in time.
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With a movie, you're there for an hour and a half and you're gone.
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This is kind of the first time I've had the opportunity
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to really develop characters over the course of a long stretch of time.
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And not just Ed, all the characters, there are nine regulars on that show.
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It's definitely where I've felt the most relaxed and at ease.
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And the Orville might be the most fulfilling experience I've had since I've been in Hollywood.

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英語のスピーキング力を上げたい中級レベルの学習者、特にIELTS スピーキング対策やネイティブらしい発音・イントネーションを磨きたい人にぴったりです。セス・マクファーレンの自然な会話スタイルは、日常的な表現から専門用語まで幅広く含まれており、動画で英語学習するのに最適な教材です。シャドーイング(shadow speak / shadowspeak)の練習にもぴったりで、リズムやアクセントを覚えながら会話力を養えます。

覚えておきたいフレーズとイディオム

  • "Copy that":「了解」「承知しました」の意味。ネイティブ同士の会話でよく使われる簡単な表現です。
  • "There's no shame in that":「それは恥ずかしいことじゃない」。他人に理解を求めるときや、自分の行動を正当化するときに使えます。
  • "Vaudevillian opposites":「似ても似つかない組み合わせ」。2人の性格や特徴が全く異なることを表します。

これらのフレーズは日常会話だけでなく、スピーキングテストでも活躍します。shadowing siteなどを使って繰り返し練習し、自然に口から出るようにしましょう。

アクセントのコツをつかもう

セス・マクファーレンの発音は明瞭で、アメリカ英語の東北部方言の影響も少し見られます。特に「r」の発音が弱く、「cool whip」のような単語では「w」の音がはっきりしています。シャドーイングをする際は、イントネーションの上げ下げとポーズのタイミングに注目しましょう。例えば、「I'm back. I'm published.」のような短い文では、文の終わりで音を落とすことでユーモアを表現しています。何度も繰り返し聞き、自分の声で真似ることで、ネイティブらしい流れを身につけることができます。

シャドーイングとは?英語上達に効果的な理由

シャドーイング(Shadowing)は、もともとプロの通訳者養成プログラムで開発された言語学習法で、多言語習得者として知られるDr. Alexander Arguelles によって広く普及されました。方法はシンプルですが非常に効果的:ネイティブスピーカーの英語を聞きながら、1〜2秒の遅延で声に出してすぐに繰り返す——まるで「影(shadow)」のように話者を追いかけます。文法ドリルや受動的なリスニングと異なり、シャドーイングは脳と口の筋肉が同時にリアルタイムで英語を処理・再現することを強制します。研究により、発音精度、抑揚、リズム、連音、リスニング力、そして会話の流暢さが大幅に向上することが確認されています。IELTSスピーキング対策や自然な英語コミュニケーションを目指す方に特におすすめです。

シャドーイングのやり方: ステップ別の完全ガイドを読む →