Like it or not, that’s how the sausage is made.
Really innocent example, doing a story about a charity doing Christmas gift wrapping to raise money to buy Christmas presents for kids in the hospital on Christmas. You have interview footage with the Director of the charity and a volunteer gift wrapper. Both interview subjects talk about the mission of the charity and how they use the money raised. Well you almost have to use the charity director talking about that instead of the volunteer. So you look at the volunteer footage. The gift wrapper talks about recycled paper, how much fun it is, how the tape keeps sticking to their hands, a story about a person getting their gifts wrapped and so on and so on. Most of that is unusable and there is only so much time for the story. In that five minutes of footage of the volunteer you don’t really have one good soundbite. So you make one. You start on a shot of them saying how much fun it is, cut to b-roll, pull the part where the interviewer got them to say what hours the gift wrapping was happening, then cut to an entirely different part of the gift wrapper saying how many types of paper they have, and then another part of how long it will take to wrap a persons gift. You take out all the “umms”, “ahs”, and “like, you know’s” and structure all of that info into something that sounds like it was all said at once, coherently, even though it wasn’t. Then after you build that, you cut back to to footage of the gift wrapper saying something heart warming about the charity. You do it right, and the gift wrapper see’s it and thinks they sound great on TV. Are you manipulating what people are saying, sure, but mostly it’s separating the wheat from the chaff. People don’t always express their thoughts in a linear order and you don’t have time on TV to let them ramble. The audience doesn’t want to see them ramble either. So you fix it. That’s just how it works.
