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Vestiges of Media Form
By Mike Flanagan | July 25, 2008
You might have heard the story of the mother preparing a roast beef dinner for her young family. Her young, inquisitive daughter observed her mom cutting off the ends of the roast before placing it in the pan to go into the oven and asked “Mom, why do you cut off the ends?” “That’s how I learned to do it from your grandmom” was the mom’s reply.
Later Grandmom was consulted. “Grandmom, why do you cut off the ends of the roast beef before putting it in the oven?” Grandmom’s wise answer was “Because the roasts were always too long for my pan. I couldn’t fit them in my oven otherwise.”
Hmmm…how many customs do we follow because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”, not because “that’s the best way to do it.”
Many of us grew up with TV commercials that were usually 30 seconds and popular songs that clocked in at 3 to 4 minutes long. It’s worth noting that the 3-minute pop song came to be that duration because that’s about as long as a 45 rpm vinyl record could hold. I’m not sure what prompted commercials to be 30 seconds, but assume that its due to some vestige of a long-gone TV past.
There are a lot of vestiges like this in the media world. Two-hour feature films. 30-minute sitcoms. 60-minute episodic TV shows. None of these time constraints must be adhered to in the new media world. Movies can be much shorter or longer than 120 minutes, for example.
Following some of these time constraints may still be advisable. At least initially because of viewers’ habits and expectations. And because if you are producing for standard TV or for release in theaters you still have to follow some rules.
The important thing to remember from this post is that rules of media are often meant to be broken, especially now with new forums for content like discs, computer hard drives, the Internet, mobile phones, and portable devices like the iPod. But not broken just for the sake of non-conformity.
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Topics: film editing |