dealing with open-ended sound bites
 

Eager to hear some others' strategies.

I'm going through about an hour's worth of MOTS interviews with teens, and I don't believe a single one of them ever definitively completes a statement.

The bites all wind up similar to "I can see how that would be a problem, so......" and then they're done talking.

Currently just close-cutting the end of the byte to lose the "so," but it still sounds open and incomplete, so....

Oh man, welcome to the talking abilities of the modern teenager. This is where all the short handed Twitter and text messaging has landed us...with an inability to speak in full thoughts.

My advice would be to just cut them off. It's not ideal but that's all you can do, right? The only solution is to make sure the interviewer gets complete sentences at the shoot.

You might already know this but make sure that when you tightly chop a sentence, you cut to some ambient sound from the same interview. that way you can lengthen out the video for a transition. Even though you will see their lips move, it flows much better in the grand scheme.

It really depends what you are trying to do. If you are trying to do a bunch of SOT's back to back, that is
one thing. If you are doing a 'story' that's another. In the past, when doing a doc, a corporate film, or a
news story, I have used the incomplete thought to 'lead' into a reporter track or a VO. Something like this:

Incomplete talking teenager: " Blah blah blah blah....I can see how that can be a problem, so......."

'Reporter track " So to combat the problem, the governor called in the National Guard to help with
the clean up."

I was going to suggest something along the same lines as Gabe. If you have two or three teenagers talking about the same subject, perhaps one incomplete though could be finished by another.

By the way, what's MOT and SOT? I Googled around but couldn't find definitions.

I found these:

SOT: Reporter’s voice Sync on Tape. News editing term for sync sound.

--or--

Sound on Tape or SOT—SOT refers to the audio recorded on tape during filming. It is used in television and film script writing to indicate portions of the edited video that will use the natural sound from the time of recording, as opposed to audio recorded later (studio voiceover for example).

MOTS: Man On The Street.

Don't know if they're right.

Thanks, Adam. I bow to your Google skills.

MOTS Man on the Street. Now that you say it, it's a term I remember. I'll bet you're right on that one, if not both.

Cheers!