Amongst the elite few DK members who are familiar with my work, it is known that I don’t post very often, but when I do it’s BIG.
I do revolutions, plain and simple.
Little or nothing about current political pettiness. No policy nit picking. Perhaps a smattering of humor now and then, but there is always something deeper to it. It’s all about making the future better thru progressive, sometimes radical ideas that will fundamentally change society.
Today while watching GMA, I got such an idea.
The story was about street racers hitting a bus — mangled metal, people running around, flames shooting out of the wreckage. Mayhem!
The idea came when I noticed that in many key scenes of the video, the text/graphic banner title actually covered the essential portion of the scene.
Always clear in the video was sky, street fixtures, stores, parked cars, pedestrians, etc., all the stuff that was not really part of the action. The thing I really wanted to see was the wreckage and roiling fire. But usually during the story, it was covered by the oversized banner placed in the middle from near the bottom to about 1/3 up the screen.
This has been going on for at least 15 years. I first noticed it during Desert Storm when the banner covered the scene of an IED attack, showing nothing but sky with some black smoke. It’s not just Good Morning America or even ABC, it’s all the news outlets — CNN, CBS, NBC and all the local stations. You would think the directors and others working at these places would have quickly noticed and corrected this obvious blunder, but no. Its almost as if the person in charge of generating and applying this effect, due to the way the equipment works, is not able to see the video AND nobody working there ever watches their own show.
So, my revolutionary idea is to have a title banner that’s small and off in a corner in which nothing interesting will be covered. And, since it does not take long to read ‘Fiery crash blocks I-95’ or ‘Anderson Cooper Mobbed by Strippers’, it could go away after a reasonable time, say 5 seconds.
Sounds crazy, right? I’m sure there are technical challenges that the professionals will say are impossibly insurmountable, but that’s the nature of progress — it’s impossible till someone does it.