INDEX	Sunday December 27, 2020
Cutting remarks
Whenever I cut vegetables I am reminded of a tv chef I watched when I was a child or young teenager. For some crazy reason when he cut vegetables there were spontaneous gasps of admiration and a round of applause as soon as he put down his knife. Now his cutting action was fast and even. He clearly knew how to do it. But as skills go it was nothing to write home about, let alone get an audience gasping. Many years later I understood what was going on. By this time I was making videos of performers and they are mostly desperately needy. They were insistent there should be waves of love in the form of applause, gasps, laughs and even cheers. I never had the canned laughter tool box (if such a thing exists) and I don't much like it when I hear it, mostly on American sit coms. What I did instead was go through the audio recordings and find the relevant expressions of audience reaction, applying them at points where the performers would want some love. I then re-applied them again and again, over and over the top of the first recording, but at slightly different time points, so it sounded like a wave of laughter or whatever. I did this until I built up the sound to almost ridiculous proportions. When I felt I'd gone as far as I dared I handed it over to the performer. Almost invariably they said go back and build it up a bit more; you can do it. I don't think viewers spotted that it was fake since the audience reaction had the sound of the room it was recorded in, unlike canned laughter. It was a trick of the trade and an illustration of the fact that you can't believe what you see and especially what you hear.
	Posted by Jonathan Brind.
INDEX
Sunday December 27, 2020