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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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Immortals: visual effects spectacular epic
Immortals is a "2011 3D action-adventure fantasy film directed by Tarsem Singh and starring Henry Cavill, Freida Pinto, and Mickey Rourke. The film was previously named Dawn of War and War of the Gods before being officially named Immortals and is loosely based on the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur and the Titanomachy."
(movieclipsTRAILERS, 17 August 2011, YouTube)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
What Dreams May Come: imagining a painted world through vfx
"Ward's 'What Dreams May Come,' starring Robin Williams was nominated for production design in addition to winning an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. The film, tells an epic love story of soul mates separated by death. The story would inspire Ward to envision the afterlife as a painted world, incorporating state-of-the-art, adapted, and entirely new visual effects technologies in an original, fully articulated, filmic view of imagined realms that may await us after death."
(Saville Productions)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
No character can exist without the context of a game world
"The role of the character in a role-playing game has long been debated. Yet no character can exist without the context of a game world. The character always has a relationship to its surroundings; the easiest way of creating a character is often through providing a context. Even if one supposedly plays oneself in a fictional world, a character - a variation on the ordinary persona - will soon emerge. "
(Markus Montola & Jaakko Stenros)
[2] Montola, M. and J. S. (eds) (2008). Playground Worlds - Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games. Finland, Ropecon ry.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Virtual Recentring: Computer Games and Possible Worlds Theory
"When a reader follows the passage into a fictional world, the realm of possibilities is recentered around her. For the duration of her immersion, she accepts the sphere created by the narrator as the actual world in the same way that the interlocutor will try to imagine the other as an Inca and the children will take the bucket for a pie. For Ryan, this fictional recentering presupposes three modal systems and three actual worlds. The first is our native system with the actual world (actually actual world) at its center. Textual fiction provides a passage to a second universe with the world projected by the text at its center (textual actual world). The third, then, is the system to which the text refers , a system that contains everything projected by the text, but also everything that is not mentioned and is filled in by the reader (textual reference world). While in fiction the world described by the text is always different from the actual world (as opposed to non-fiction), it will generally be indistinguishable from the world to which it refers (the third system). Only when a narrator lies and this can be inferred, the reader will know that what is described by the text is not what the world it refers to is like. Since this is a marginal case and insignificant for this study, I will focus on two systems when dealing with recentering: the actual world on the one hand, and the textual world on the other. Moreover, I tend to take the poststructuralist stance that the actual world is equally a cultural construct. It should be seen as a representation conforming to the reader's image of the world, not as something that exists anywhere outside of representation. This perspective permits to install a symmetry between two representations: the representation of the actual world present in the head of the reader, and the representation of the textual world built from the text, and it explains why the reader can slip from one world into another so seamlessly."
(Jan Van Looy, August 2005)
Issue 12. Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
