Girl Meets Geekdom

Today in screenwriting class we had video conferences with two TV network presidents, Kevin Reilly, the president of NBC, and Steve McPherson the president of ABC. Both were Cornell graduates who, incidentally, not only knew each other before they both went to Hollywood but also were in the same fraternity while they were at Cornell. Both of them look too young to have so much control over the television shows America watches.

We began our video conference with Kevin Reilly, a charismatic man who showed up with a can of red bull, which he jokingly claimed to be the drink of network presidents. After some quick introductions, our professor informed him of some sort of an implicit confidentiality agreement…which means I’m not going to go into any details, not that there’s anything particularly juicy anyway.

I asked him why American television shows do not follow models common with Asian television, where the show has a finite run and the story contains a distinct beginning, middle, and end. His response was that the better question is, why they do not follow the American model. Apparently it costs a lot more to do it the American way, and countries in Asia and Europe do not have an entertainment machine to match that of the US. He described the American system as being more evolved. In the States, even though some shows can really benefit from a beginning, middle, and end, they just run it indefinitely because that’s the way the television economy here works. I never had a chance for a follow-up, but I really don’t see why cheaper production cost is a problem. I mean, a finite-run show could attract bigger stars to television, so if a finite show costs less and still has the same audience potential, isn’t that a good thing? Frankly, I find comfort know that my story is going somewhere. If American television series had a beginning, middle, and end, I might watch more television shows.

So after talking to two presidents of major TV networks what are my general impressions on the television industry? Money plays a bigger role in TV. I guess that no-brainer anyway, but it plays a much bigger role than even I expected. I mean, even the most business conscious of film executives talk about how they look for good characters and strong voices in their scripts, with television, they’re more willing to admit to the impact of viewership.

Have you ever wondered why most game dialogue has to be so cheesy? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we’re given a lot of time to think about the dialogue. I was reading Roger Ebert’s essay on the 1977 movie Annie Hall today and his brief note on average shot lengths got be thinking. Woody Allen, who is a champion of witty dialogue, has long average shot lengths, with Annie Hall at ~14 seconds, and a film like Armageddon having something around 2 seconds, which Ebert argues is too short for intelligent dialogue. Now any game writer will tell you that they aim to make game dialogue short and snappy—more to the Armageddon model, which begs the question: is game dialogue stupid and cheesy by nature? Unlike movies, games tend not to compensate for the pace, giving us more time to meditate on the cheesy nature of snappy dialogue. If you take an average game that actually has cutting in their cut scene, I’m sure you will find incredibly long “shot length” if you were to play it out at a reasonable pace. The visuals are not snappy. We don’t move on fast enough. All there is for us to absorb at any piece of dialogue are the words itself. You know why the dialogue in Armageddon works? We move on from the dialogue fast, they know to keep our attention off the words.

Sure, we can argue, lots of games have real time facial expressions now to compensate for the lack of activity in cut scenes—but lets face it, they fail to capture the depth of emotions as a real person. In movies, we can fixate on certain actors and read something out of that, in games, you have to try a lot harder. During gameplay, cuts has to make sense for the game play, but are there specific things that can be done to make the camera more dynamic? The cinematic dynamics in cut scene have certainly gone up, but so far, I haven’t seen anything that pushed any limits. Film theorist David Bordwell once noted that average shot length of Hollywood films decreased dramatically over the years. Thus, pace has increased in films over the years and audience attention span has decreased and games are generally fast-paced in everywhere where there is not a lot of dialogue. I think it’s about time exposition got more dynamic — up the pace, and cheesy lines will become far more acceptable.

Actually I don’t really blog. I have a Xanga, and I don’t keep it updated. I used to try to keep journals, but I can never keep that up. I do store a lot of random thoughts in my head, and I guess the only reason why I never really wrote that on my Xanga was just that Xanga never really felt like it was mine. It feels a little weird to write anything serious there. I don’t think I had a single entry that didn’t end every sentence with a gazillion !!!’s. My new website redesign runs on Drupal, a content management system which allows me to edit my page from the site itself. It seems like its designed mostly for bloggers, so I figured since the functionality was there, I might as well use it. Plus, it’d be nice to have a section on my website that can potentially be constantly updated as well as a place to congregate my ideas.