television

Showing 147 posts tagged television

The Game Of Thrones Opening Credits

John Axelrod of Forbes:

How to construct one? They have approximately three months to produce the credits, and create the sequences for all 10 episodes in one batch. The credits change weekly as campaigns expand or end in ignoble defeat, and all every location in the episode must appear on the atlas. 

The music alone might make it the best title sequence in all of television, but the intricate animation work — which changes week-to-week — just puts it over the top.

The Next Xbox Will Take Over Your TV

Tom Warren for The Verge:

The functionality will work by taking a cable box signal and passing it through to the Xbox via HDMI, allowing Microsoft’s console to overlay a UI and features on top of an existing TV channel or set-top box. We’re told that this is a key part of the next-generation Xbox and that it will go a step further than Google’s TV implementation thanks to Microsoft’s partnerships with content providers. Extended support for various cable services will be rolled out gradually, but the basic functionality will be available at launch.

While Google TV obviously went nowhere, I view this as a smart play by Microsoft. The content partnerships are key. Let’s hope they can get all of them in place.

On the other hand:

Coupled with this TV functionality, Microsoft’s next-generation Kinect sensor will also play a role in the company’s TV focus. The Verge has learned that the next Kinect will detect multiple people simultaneously, including the ability to detect eye movement to pause content when a viewer turns their head away from a TV. 

I really don’t understand this functionality. It sounds like a stupid novelty in the new Samsung Galaxy phone, and I think it’s worse here. Given how many people now “watch” TV with a second screen, is it going to pause every three seconds?

"But Good Ideas Are Good Ideas."

Rachel Dodes looks at the rise of texting onscreen in movies/television. In  House of Cards:

Executive producer David Fincher, who directed the first two episodes of the show, decided that he wanted the texts to appear almost as text bubbles with a pale blue or gray background, depending on who was sending the message, as opposed to showing close-ups of phones. After he proposed the caption idea, Mr. Willimon showed him some clips from “Sherlock,” which depicts texts on screen as white subtitles in a Helvetica font, and asked “Is this what you had in mind?” Mr. Fincher “was a bit bummed that it had been done before,” he says. “But good ideas are good ideas.”

Indeed. I really liked the way texting was handled in House of Cards, right down to the iOS-like details.