Interstitials: messages or declarations addressed to the viewer
"Interstitials can therefore be found within programmes as well as around them. They constitute a class of television output rather than a genre. They consist of messages or declarations addressed to the viewer from outside the diegetic worlds of fiction or the discourses of news, documentary and factuality. They consist of metadata about both the programme of the moment and the future plans of the broadcaster. They bring together the past and future of broadcasting within its present moment. In addition to this metadata function, other forms of interstitial come from agencies beyond the world of broadcasting who are given conditional access to broadcasting: the advertisers, the sponsors and the government in the form of its public service announcements. This is a whole class of television output: heterogeneous, but occupying a distinct position in relation to the other class of television that is programmes of whatever genre. Sometimes interstitials overlap with or invade programmes. Interstitials make up a class that we have to learn to distinguish. One of the problems of arriving in a new television culture is that of learning how the interstitials work - what they are trying to tell you; how they interlace with the programmes; how they shape the spaces that the programmes occupy; and how they build anticipation and delay into the development of those programmes. It can take an appreciable amount of time to become a skilled viewer as a result."
(John Ellis, 2011, p.95)
Published in: Ephemeral Media, Transitory Screen Culture from Television to YouTube Edited by Paul Grainge Palgrave Macmillan, November 2011 ISBN: 978-1-84457-434-6, ISBN10: 1-84457-434-2 http://us.macmillan.com/ephemeralmedia/PaulGrainge
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Fonda and Bronson's famous duel in Once Upon a Time in the West
"Epic story of a mysterious stranger with a harmonica who joins forces with a notorious desperado to protect a beautiful widow from a ruthless assassin working for the railroad."
(IMDb.com, Inc.)
Fig.1 Sergio Leone (1968). "Once Upon a Time in the West"
[See from this point for a good example of film flashback to explain backstory, where Charles Bronson's character reveals a moment from his past. The exposition provides a direct way of adding context and meaning to current situation.]
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The Preface as Exegesis
"A preface provides a way into understanding a book: by stating its subject and scope, by commenting on techniques employed or themes addressed, or by focussing on a central or contentious issue. Prefacing involves an explicatory introduction to a reading of a work.
Some writers are more prone to prefacing than others. In the last century, three great exponents of the preface have been Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov and John Barth. Greene's prefaces are usually succinct, genuinely concerned with aspects of the writing process, and sometimes wryly humorous. ...
The idea of exegesis is not a recent imposition of universities upon creative writing; it is a long-term and also current feature of our overall culture. For almost two thousand years (as long as the word 'exegesis' can be backtracked in its significance) people have asked for explanations that linked written works produced in the culture to main concerns of the culture. Partly this has been a low culture plea to high culture. Partly it has been an element of ongoing high culture debate over contentious issues. 'Tell me further what you mean - analyse and dissect and orientate - so that I can more fully understand and believe you,' the culture has asked of texts on the one hand. But also it has said: 'Tell me further what you mean, so that I can better argue with you.' These are, I think, the two arms of the nature of exegesis."
(Nigel Krauth)
Krauth, N. (2002). "The Preface as Exegesis." TEXT 6(1).
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H2Oil: dramatic animated expository sequences
"Alberta sits over one of the largest recoverable oil patches in the world, second only to Saudi Arabia. It covers 149, 000 square kilometers, an area larger than Florida, and holds at least 175 billion barrels of recoverable crude bitumen. Canada has become the largest supplier of oil to the U.S., with over a million barrels per day coming from the oil sands. Currently 40% of all oil produced in Canada is derived from the oil sands.
The crude oil produced from the oil sands, the dirtiest oil in the world, could keep the global appetite for oil at bay for another 50 years.
But oil sands are a fundamentally different kind of oil. They take a lot of energy and a lot of water and leave a very large environmental footprint compared to all other forms of oil extraction. Because of this, the massive changes to the boreal forest and the watershed have prompted the United Nations to list this region as a global hot spot for environmental change.
In addition, oil sands projects are major emitters of greenhouse gases. They accounted for 4% of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2005, making it impossible to meet obligations set out in Kyoto for emissions-reductions."
(H2Oil)
Fig.1 Dale Hayward & Sylvie Trouvé, James Braithwaite, Daniel Legace. 'La Moustache'.
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The Six Million Dollar Man: the evolution of an iconic title sequence
"The Six Million Dollar Man started off as a novel by [Martin Caidin] called Cyborg, but over the course of its development from book to movie to TV show, it not only changed name, it changed tone.
The book is essentially a thriller that tries to ground itself in reality as much as possible to make Steve Austin a super-spy. Sure he has a bionics left arm (yes, bionics in the book, not bionic), bionics legs and bionics eye. But he can't feel anything in his bionics limbs and his bionics eye won't let him see, only take pictures. And sure, he's very strong, but when he kicks a golf ball, that bionics toe of his still gets crushed by the impact.
It was bionics, but still tried to be relatively aware of the laws of physics and what was practical."
(The Medium is Not Enough TV blog, 9 July 2010)
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