Similar Posts
Glacier Exit – A short documentary showing a glacier’s retreat
Originally they meant to go out to have an adventure. They interviewed an individual about how the glacier’s rate of retreat has been increasing over the years. “I used to come here with a snow plow. Now I need a lawnmower”.
Global warming is visible around the world. Rockfalls have made hiking dangerous. There have been rockfalls at “Les Cosmiques” as well as along one of the routes I walked last year near Zermatt.
There are so many images of how glaciers used to look and how they look now. What was under hundreds of metres of ice is now supporting mature trees.
In the documentary above I like the point where you see markers to see how far the glacier has retreated. It would have been better if they had marked the points with the years on a map, so that we could see how fast melt is increasing.
Cat in a shark costume on a Roomba vacuum cleaner
Shark week is here and along with it so the opportunity for shark videos to appear arrives. In one case a cat apparently likes traveling around rooms on a roomba while wearing a shark costume. Why a cat would wear a shark costume is one question. The second is how you get the costume on the cat. It’s a cat after all. They’re known for their personality after all.
And if that wasn’t enough look at this chick and how he behaves.
On advertising and how it has degraded the viewer’s experience
Advertising and documentaries don’t mix and this is especially true in the US. When you have ad breaks every 5-10 minutes telling a story is impossible. You have to think of the people tuning in half way, and you need to think of those leaving after just one ad break. As a result of this the documentary has to be sensationalised. It also needs to be a loop. Mythbusters are a series that I enjoyed watching for many months. As the series progressed however they were made less watchable. The reason for this is coping with the advertising regime of the channels on which they are broadcast.
On watching these documentaries episode after episode you spend three quarters of your time being told what happened before and what’s going to happen afterwards. New content is about twenty percent of the show. If you were to cut down their shows to remove the repetition you’d go from a one hour programme to a 15 minute show. This is perfect for the web, but impossible to watch on television.
Commercial broadcasters say that they have to fight for the audience’s attention, that they have to make it as sensationalistic and entertaining as possible. They need to use breathless reporters, they need to use advanced graphics and more. They blame the audience for not having the attention span to sit through 45 minutes of content without switching.
The audience is not to blame. It’s the content interruption that is to blame. Television adverts are disruptive. They usually add nothing to the enjoyment of a show. Television watching, as it’s broadcast, has become old fashioned. Why watch something live when you’re going to waste twenty to thirty percent of that time watching adverts for products that are of no use to us as consumers at this point in our lives. If we record the show using a PVR we can skip the ads and watch the show almost without interruption. It’s pleasant. It’s efficient.
Advertisers are not happy with this. They want a guarantee of eyeballs. That’s where our new media landscape comes in. Video on Demand is so convenient today that if we like an advert we’ll go to youtube and other sources, find the advert and watch it. You don’t need a show for people to watch the advert. You don’t need an advert to pay for the content.
Sunday afternoon
Soon I may have internet access in my halls again and at that point the writing will begin again. it’s hard to be inspired in a library. On the positive side I’ve watched up to three new documentaries since last night so I’m wondering whether to look at the origins of french and English cinema.
I had some inspiration whilst attempting to watch Nightmail by Grierson.
Tonight I shall be watching Philibert’s L’empire des Sourd, documentary I recently read about.
I went to see Borat and it’s really amusing, a good excuse to laugh for more than an hour.