Vox-Pop

The Vox-Pop comes from the Latin ‘vox populi’, ‘the voice of the people’. It’s used by reporters to get an indication of public reaction to a piece of news. A number of people would be interviewed and would reply to the same questions which would then be edited together.

The class was set a task for the day. It was to create a Vox pop on what the students of the college thought about a certain area of television.

The question that I put to the students was:

What is it about reality TV programmes that you think people find so appealing?

Bit of a boring subject, but it always is, doing a Vox pop! Normally the scariest thing about conducting one is gathering the material, but for some reason, for this task I didn’t have a problem with finding the courage to ask a bunch of random people about this truly boring subject.
The worse thing is when you ask someone the question and they don’t give you any kind of answer. You can’t say to them it was crap and ask for another one because they simply don’t want to hang about. Luckily this time I got quite a few good responses from my question. In the end I gathered about twenty answers, with the majority of them being usable.
The next task was editing my findings. This is the most boring and time consuming Vox pop. The problem I came across whilst editing was finding that I had interviewed some of people in the cafeteria where the ambience is high and very obvious, and others in quite environments like in a class room. To fix the problem of having the Vox pop change from loud to quite sections, and knowing I couldn’t get rid of the background from the cafeteria, I decided to use that ambient sound over the quiet parts as well hopefully giving the impression the Vox pop took place in the same environment.

Although it takes a lot skill to create a good and effective Vox pop, for me, its not one of those projects I ever feel happy about once finished. I can’t feel proud of what I’ve created because I find them simply bland. For a project to inspire, it needs to require me to use my creativity rather than my intelligence, which I think are the grounds on which the Vox pop relies on. Your intelligence is key when creating a Vox pop as you need to know how to structure the piece to make it bias, using the right opening and closing statement. Where creativity is concerned, I don’t think it is at all evident in a Vox pop, they all sound the same to me.