![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favorite interview, a book, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.
A thing worth noting, I suppose, is that even in strongly visual media like television, movies, and video games, I'm often listening more than I am watching. This makes me more typical than you might think - Leslie Nielsen, when talking about Police Squad!, the television show better known by its movie franchise The Naked Gun (the first movie has "from the files of Police Squad!" on it), he reflected that a lot of the homes in the show didn't work as well as they had hoped because during the daytime, even the show was on, the target demographic of at-home parents were usually doing something else while the television was on. Strictly visual gags didn't work because the audience wasn't watching.
Unsurprisingly, I also get glared at by other people in my life when it doesn't look like I'm watching a movie fully. I haven't yet figured out a way of saying "If I'm not watching the movie, it's because the movie is not doing enough things that will engage my attention." Usually, that translates to "the story isn't interesting enough and the main characters aren't, either." It also means "movies should be enjoyable by people with disabilities", including things like the descriptive video service and subtitles, but also that a movie should cohere pretty well if you removed the visuals or if you removed the audio. Paying attention to the details makes the experience better.
Here's an example, from a show I like a lot - Person of Interest.
This is the opening credits for the first season. Unlike other shows, the actors' names are not mentioned, and while the voiceover is of Harold Finch, the creator of the machine that gives him and his partner, John Reese, the numbers to investigate, the perspective is that of the machine itself, signaling who the main character actually is.
The credits sequence also foreshadows who will be the person of interest by inserting a small amount of episode footage into the credits. It's a small detail, easy to overlook unless you are watching many episodes next to each other, but since these episodes are from the perspective of the machine, it madness sense for the credits to include the person who is the target of the episode, in case later retrieval is needed.
This is Season Two, which introduced a rather neat trick into the opening - not only is there a new character on the "hunted by the police", indicating the arrival of Detective Fusco by this point.
At a certain point in Season Two, the Machine comes under attack from a computer virus. In other series, where credits and other such things are considered outside the universe of the show, nothing would happen to the credits even as the Machine continued to suffer. In Person of Interest, though, we get this:
And that's not the entire sequence, just what I could find available. Since the Machine is crashing, the credits are also crashing. The details are important.
Person of Interest does a lot of this in their opening sequences - swapping in new narrators, new looks, and occasionally messing with the flow of the credits sequence, depending on the status of the Machine and the humans. In some ways, it resembles the way that Fringe would also shift its title sequence around to give clues to the audience about the state of its universe. (I doubt this is coincidental, given that several names are in common between the two.) They all might also owe the idea to the short-lived Dilbert animation, which also changed things in the titles between every episode.
With the advent of digital recording technologies, season-at-once watching, and the ability for entire seasons and shows to be broadcast and financed at once, so as not to need to structure sorry around advertising breaks, I can only see this trend of titles tampering continuing as birth a way of informing viewers, but also as a way of getting a viewer not to simply fast forward or skip their way to the next chapter point.
Details are what help make fandom work. As creators and experiencers, we can both do well to pay attention to them.
A thing worth noting, I suppose, is that even in strongly visual media like television, movies, and video games, I'm often listening more than I am watching. This makes me more typical than you might think - Leslie Nielsen, when talking about Police Squad!, the television show better known by its movie franchise The Naked Gun (the first movie has "from the files of Police Squad!" on it), he reflected that a lot of the homes in the show didn't work as well as they had hoped because during the daytime, even the show was on, the target demographic of at-home parents were usually doing something else while the television was on. Strictly visual gags didn't work because the audience wasn't watching.
Unsurprisingly, I also get glared at by other people in my life when it doesn't look like I'm watching a movie fully. I haven't yet figured out a way of saying "If I'm not watching the movie, it's because the movie is not doing enough things that will engage my attention." Usually, that translates to "the story isn't interesting enough and the main characters aren't, either." It also means "movies should be enjoyable by people with disabilities", including things like the descriptive video service and subtitles, but also that a movie should cohere pretty well if you removed the visuals or if you removed the audio. Paying attention to the details makes the experience better.
Here's an example, from a show I like a lot - Person of Interest.
This is the opening credits for the first season. Unlike other shows, the actors' names are not mentioned, and while the voiceover is of Harold Finch, the creator of the machine that gives him and his partner, John Reese, the numbers to investigate, the perspective is that of the machine itself, signaling who the main character actually is.
The credits sequence also foreshadows who will be the person of interest by inserting a small amount of episode footage into the credits. It's a small detail, easy to overlook unless you are watching many episodes next to each other, but since these episodes are from the perspective of the machine, it madness sense for the credits to include the person who is the target of the episode, in case later retrieval is needed.
This is Season Two, which introduced a rather neat trick into the opening - not only is there a new character on the "hunted by the police", indicating the arrival of Detective Fusco by this point.
At a certain point in Season Two, the Machine comes under attack from a computer virus. In other series, where credits and other such things are considered outside the universe of the show, nothing would happen to the credits even as the Machine continued to suffer. In Person of Interest, though, we get this:
And that's not the entire sequence, just what I could find available. Since the Machine is crashing, the credits are also crashing. The details are important.
Person of Interest does a lot of this in their opening sequences - swapping in new narrators, new looks, and occasionally messing with the flow of the credits sequence, depending on the status of the Machine and the humans. In some ways, it resembles the way that Fringe would also shift its title sequence around to give clues to the audience about the state of its universe. (I doubt this is coincidental, given that several names are in common between the two.) They all might also owe the idea to the short-lived Dilbert animation, which also changed things in the titles between every episode.
With the advent of digital recording technologies, season-at-once watching, and the ability for entire seasons and shows to be broadcast and financed at once, so as not to need to structure sorry around advertising breaks, I can only see this trend of titles tampering continuing as birth a way of informing viewers, but also as a way of getting a viewer not to simply fast forward or skip their way to the next chapter point.
Details are what help make fandom work. As creators and experiencers, we can both do well to pay attention to them.
