Greetings, user! I come to you today with a plethora, no, a glut of exciting and stimulating information to feed your gray matter!
…Not really. But I do have a lot of interesting stuff.
First of all, in this article, the author mentioned a reoccurring motif that I've found. Goldfish's attention span. Apparently it is 10 seconds long. Not so exciting. But what is exciting is that American children (12 and under) see more than 40,000 TV commercials per year! That's crazy, man! Ten years ago advertising agencies spent about 6 billion dollars advertising to children. Today they spend over twice that. That's a lotta ads. This article was the first to suggest major changes to solve this problem. It mentioned how a lot of european countries have created legislature about advertising to children. "Greece bans toy advertisements on TV between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m.; Sweden bans all TV advertising aimed at children under 12; and Denmark, Finland, and Norway don’t allow sponsorship of any children’s programs. Canada’s Broadcasting Code, which severely restricts children’s advertising, bans ads implying that a product will make a child happier or more popular." How awesome is that? I think that the US should try this out. Cooper raised an interesting point in this article as well. Adults understand what a commercial is: a sales pitch. Children don't. The APA (American Psychological Association) reports that "children under the age of 8 can't grasp the notion that commercials have a purpose other than entertainment, and they completely believe what they see and hear."
Dude? Are you still paying attention to me? This article gives a really good definition of "Attention Span", and raises the point that perhaps TV and the web aren't the cause of our inattentiveness, but rather, the result. He points out that TVs and movies use multiple angles because we'd get bored if they didn't.
Hey… I think I've heard that somewhere before. Where...?
Ah, here. This book , which has been sitting on my shelf for the past two years not only conveniently solves my lack of a non--electronic source, but also gives some interesting history to modern cinema editing. On page 121, it talks about how…
Wait. First you need to know a little something about editing.
Editing 101
Wide shot: feet to above head
Medium Shot: waist to top of head
Close up: Collar bone to forehead
Ok. So when editing first became a profession and stopped being a chore, directors (and studios, by proxy) had very little confidence in their audience. They believed that if the film cut from a wide shot to a close up, audiences would get confused. They wouldn't spatially understand what just happened. Take, for instance, this hypothetical scene pitch.
Shot 1: Show a helicopter shot of downtown Chicago
Shot 2: Show the exterior of a busy office high rise
Shot 3: Show the busy lobby
Shot 4: We see people entering the elevator
Shot 5: Close up of a woman wearing a powersuit, checking her watch.
OK? Now take out shots 2-4. Doesn't quite make so much sense, does it? But this is changing. Movies now switch from shot 1 to shot 3, or shot 2 to shot 5. The last movie I saw in theaters (HSM3), began with an extreme close up (chin to eyebrows), and ended the scene with an extremely wide shot (an entire set or location) of the gym.
If you were to watch a film that didn't cut from angle to angle much, you'd get bored. But would you get bored if you watched a film without the mandatory explosions or car chase sequences?
Lastly, a final fact.
"In a study of 2,600 children ages 1 to 3, researchers found that the more television the little people watch the more likely they are to suffer from attention-span deficit by the age of 7."
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