Fun interview from AVclub with reality TV writer Troy Devolld. I especially love the mention of the Frankenbite: Cutting up soundbite and combining them with the kuloshov effect so you can literally make people say anything.
Frankenbite, by definition, is just when you take original spoken material and you cut it into a smaller, or different, version of itself. There’s a big difference between the Frankenbiting that you’re probably thinking about most often and the Frankenbite that actually has to happen for a show. If I say, “Yesterday I went to the mall, I bought a lemonade, I rode the kids’ train, and then I bought a pair of pants,” but all I needed to know is there’s a pair of pants, I will Frankenbite it down into, “I went to the mall and I bought a pair of pants.” Because after all, a reality show’s only half an hour to an hour long, and you can’t have somebody, every time they open their mouth, take 20 or 25 seconds to relay the thought. So Frankenbiting should be for the compression of time.
When you are Frankenbiting for the purpose of making someone say something they didn’t say, then there’s a whole ethical thing that comes into play, which is you don’t want someone to say something that isn’t authentic to their character. But I could take that same sentence that says, “Today, I went to the mall and bought pants” [and say], “Well, there was a scene where she went to a boutique, and it wasn’t at the mall, and I want to set up the top of the scene. And somewhere else she says, ‘My friend at the boutique.’” I could say, “Today I went to the [cut] boutique [cut] and bought pants.” So I’m changing the location. I’m not doing anything sinister. It’s sort of mixing the spackle to hold the show together without having to redo the interviews.
I love how the ethical ambiguity and drive for success of the program are mentioned and then veered away from. Editing in it’s essence is a very problematic activity just as it is in journalism. I will have to absorb Frankenbite in my vocabulary. Do you know great or shocking examples of Frankenbiting?
