What do I do with my hands when I’m on air? If I had a pound……and all that.
It’s a good question though because we know – largely because they tell us – that viewers hate it when reporters & presenters wave their arms around. Or use them to STRESS EVERY SYL-LA-BLE. Those guilty of the above can watch Charlie Brooker’s How to Report the News parody and cringe.
I’ll give you some tips on what to do with your hands in my next blog, but before that I’ll shed some light onto why I think people on the telly default to over-emphatic hand movements. It’s because they’re trying to be energetic, engaging and expressive. They use those movements to buoy them up and create a sense of urgency or importance. Emphasising every word with your hands leads to a really weird intonation in your voice that’s very far away from conversational cadence. And so it looks really unnatural, is distracting and is also exhausting to watch.
Expression and energy need to come from other places. I often make presenters do a piece to camera holding their hands behind their back so they can’t use them. This forces them to use other things in their physical tool box – their voice and their eyes for example. Some people really struggle with this exercise because they’ve been relying too heavily on their hands to life their performance. Those arms and hands just want to keep popping out to STRESS ANOTHER WORD.
So the trick is to use them sparingly, bring them out when you really want to make a statement. Bring them out when they can do something more meaningful than just add emphasis.
That means you have to think a bit harder about what you’re saying so you can work out when those hands might actually help you make something clearer or more engaging for the viewer.
Can they make a shape or movement that’s relevant to the story or location? Are you showing how big something is, or how tiny or how far something stretches, or how something is split in half? Are you hand movements going to be small because you’re in a small space or are they going to be large because you’re in a big space?
You have to take control of your arms and hands and learn to re-use them. At the start this will be slightly strange because you’ll be overthinking it and be painfully aware of every hand movement. But watch yourself back, learn what works and your brain will pick it up quickly and eventually you’ll reset your default. No doubt, the viewers will thank you.
