In the bizarre world of short-form video, nobody is allowed to take a breath. Adrian Chiles writes that something dreadful is happening in these videos: the pauses between sentences, or even between clauses within sentences, are cut out. Each sentence clatters into the next, so whoever is talking sounds as if they’ve lost control of their speech. Words tumble out in a frantically fast but disjointed torrent.
Why Breaths Are Removed
Chiles explains that when he berates people under 30 who work in this field, they sound puzzled at first. It is so normal to them that he needs to jog their memories about punctuation and pauses of the olden days. They shrug and explain that if you don’t do it this way, nobody will watch past the first second. “You’ve got to edit the breaths out,” one creator told him, “to keep the pace up.” Chiles asks how much time is saved with the removal of each breath; the creator reckons each pause for breath is between 0.1 of a second and one whole second long. And out they must all come.
Impact on Viewers
Chiles notes that in real life nobody speaks like this. An audiobook played extra fast sounds ridiculous but still feels more natural than this de-breathed weirdness. He supposes the purpose is to communicate to the viewer that the creator knows their time is so precious they’re not going to waste any of it making them sit through whole seconds of tedious breathing. Chiles recalls that when he first started at the BBC, he was surprised at how much time was spent “de-umming” recorded interviews, taking the ums and ahs out to make the interviewee sound more fluent. Even without physical tape, taking out every breath must be soul-destroying.
A Breathless Example
Chiles clicked on a short video about Andy Burnham’s wife. It went: “What do we know about Andy Burnham’s wifeMarie-France van HeelThe pair met at Cambridge Uni …” and so on, for 47 breathless seconds. Sweetly though, the subtitles do feature punctuation. Chiles acknowledges it is brilliantly done, with the shot often changing at the point where the breath once was. It is an assault on the senses and no mistake. But he wonders where it ends: the words are already pared down to a minimum; what’s next to go after the breaths? If we tolerate this, our sanity, or what’s left of it, will be next.
