Editing Techniques In Talent Shows

Talent Shows are currently one of the most popular television genres. Following the success of the Reality genre, Talent Shows fascinate the audience because of the fact that they show real people put under pressure to perform at their best. The public see people become stars overnight.

Much of the success is from the editing techniques used in the talent show genre. The editing style and choices manipulate the way the audience perceive contestants and judges increasing the entertainment value of the programme.

 

A good example of this would be the Susan Boyle audition for Britain’s Got Talent. When the audience are first introduced to her, we are shown a unflattering shot of her eating a sandwich, this was used to create a negative image. In addition to this, there was non-diegetic comical music put over the footage to emphasise the negative connotations. Furthermore, as Susan went to appear on stage and was greeted by Ant and Dec, non-diegetic laughter was put in the background to make the audience think her audition would be terrible, like her appearance. As she was on stage, the editing drifted from shot to shot of peoples different facial expression towards her.

One  shot shown below is from someone in the audience laughing at the idea of what her audition is going to sound like and other shots were of the judges expressions of  smirking and talking to Susan. The editor chose to show a chot of simon rolling his eyes because he is basically the star of the show and the main opinion comes from him. This shot from the edit was then depicted by his reaction shot to when she began singing. As Susan starts singing, the whole audience clap, the edits go from showing peoples negative opinions to positively shocked, cheerful faces. Even Ant & Dec were clapping and saying ‘you didn’t expect that, did ya?’.

When Susan reaches that last few high notes , a shot of Amanda standing up is shown to applaud Susan's audition then a shot of the audience shows everyone else creating a standing innovation. The editors then decided to keep the footage of her walking off as soon as she had finished her song, just as part of the entertainment. All these editing techniques have been used to generate a negative image of Susan, so that the audience are expecting a dreadful audition but then get the shock when they hear her amazing voice. This is just merely one example from the Talent show genre. This is the type of editing used to entertain the Nation.