There is definitely an art to giving sound bytes: don’t try and be clever, because cleverness does not travel well to the next day, says Malavika Sangghvi.
How quickly new technologies pervade our lives and demand that we cope with them: blogs have become addictive, every second day there appears to be a new MMS scandal amidst us, and the era of ersatz TV sound bytes is on us good and proper.
We live in an age where it is quite natural to expect a TV mike thrust in our faces at any given opportunity. At parties, sweaty hostesses will sally forth and ask you what you’re drinking or thinking as though you were their best friend, and this was a private conversation in the girl’s loo.
And what’s more amazing- people actually queue up to answer these silly questions, responding in the manner that they were asked, apparently quite OK with the fact that they are being broadcast to millions of viewers!
I think I have become something of a sound byte junkie, as I watch in amazement the depths of silliness that people fall to when a TV camera is thrust in their face.
Giddy headed guests at an afternoon brunch were being featured on my TV screen one evening and I watched in horror as inebriated and chuffed at the same time, they proceeded to say the first vacuous thing that came to their pretty air heads. Things that I am sure they were mortified by a day later. (Or what is more worrying-were not.)
On another channel another kind of sound byte was unraveling: it was the funeral of a respected film director-a man who had lived a full and famous life well in to his eighties. And there you had an aspiring actress enacting an Oscar winning performance-with pauses, emotional emphasis and dialogue delivery. “It came as a complete shock to me!” said the actress-about the death of an 87 year old man! What did she expect? Immortality?
Then there is the sound byte of the politician who addresses vast multitudes of voters beyond the TV cameras. Using the opportunity to garner some image building while he is being questioned about a completely different matter altogether. To watch a politician arrange his features and his image to appear politically correct and vote-worthy while delivering a random sound byte is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. How sincere he comes across, how committed, how lucid.
Then there are the sound bytes of the man on the street, when he is asked to pontificate on whatever the current controversy of the day is: in my book these constitute the best sound bytes of all: unhampered by public image, or political correctness, the man on the street usually responds with straight from the heart, off- the- cuff honest replies.
There is definitely an art to giving sound bytes: don’t try and be clever, because cleverness does not travel well to the next day; don’t try and be witty, because wittiness of the moment usually falls flat with the passage of time; don’t assume that the viewer is as excited as you are while watching-if you’re four champagne glasses down-chances are you’re in another zone altogether.
And lastly-if you really want my advice on how to deal with that mike thrust in your face at parties, funerals, political rallies and film premieres-just don’t.
Spare yourself -and your poor viewer the embarrassment. Blogs can be ignored, MMS scandals fade away, but your sound byte can be telecast on a hundred repeats to haunt you till kingdom come!
s_malavika@dnaindia.net
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