Any editor who’s ever worked with interview footage has at some point experienced the profound frustration of their subject failing to land an important thought. The wrong inflection can make a perfectly concise statement sound more like a question, or the subject stumbles over a critical term or phrase. It’s often possible to fake it by stitching together unrelated vowels and consonants stolen from other spots in the interview, but these frankenbites rarely sound natural. In a single-camera shoot with no b-roll, you can’t even cover the cut.
I’ve recently discovered PLAY.HT (maybe it’s just called Play?), an elegant, terrifying tool seemingly designed for this precise scenario. See below for a demonstration of its well-intentioned use; no doubt it’s capable of more sinister tricks.
Please note: With this brief demo I’d hoped to achieve something akin to comedy, but it’s entirely possible the frantic tone has rendered the whole thing somewhat incoherent.