Sound Bites

Rona Boakye

Task 4 - Soundbites

Soundbites are short snappy provocative answers that normally politicians use to advertise to grab viewers attention. In class we did a task where we had to try and get these soundbites for our documentary. My documentary is about stray dogs, it took me quite awhile to make up these questions. When I finish making up these question we had to ask people in our class questions answers while recording them. This process was a bit difficult because everybody was talking at the same time so you had to be loud and also be quite close to the person you was asking the question to.

My first question was 'Do you think that Dangerous dogs should be killed?', I got mix response with this questions. My two favorite responses that I think would be good sound bites and would grab the views attention are 'There only dangerous or harmless if their owners are the same towards them' and ' Yeah because I am not a fan of dogs anyways, so if they are dangerous then I feel that they should be killed'. These represents the two views on this topic.  My other two questions were 'Would you be scared of people if you were abused?' and 'Would you like to be homeless?' I thought that I could have phrase these questions differently so it would have been more provocative and I could have got better responses. Some of the responses were very similar or very short. But some of these responses could be very usefully for my interview and when I do my documentary I will be include this technique. I think the best way to get a good response from the interviewee is to ask them a controversial question and to get a controversial response. I think this is the best way of getting people to talk about documentary even if it has some negative responses. To have a controversial soundbite in your documentary will catch the audience attentions and make them want to know more about the documentary.

When researching about soundbite I found a video of the reelections for the president of USA. I don't find politics interesting at all especially American but some of these soundbites made me want to watch and see who wins even though Obama already won that elections. One soundbite I like is from Michael Obama, this soundbite is regarding the election and she says 'This elections will be closer than the last one that we can count on' the way she said they statement was punchy and short, also got across her point. Compared to my interview, her statement seem a little bit thought, she sounded more confident to answer the question and she knew more about the topic that she was talking about whereas my interview people had to think fast , they didn't really know about the topic and were pressured the answer correctly. There was also a series of soundbites from the news presenters saying 'The mad dash for campaign cash',  'cash dash', 'The battle of the bundler'. This showed me that news presenters can also have catchy soundbites not only the interviewees.