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🖖🏼🖖🏿 LLAP 🖖🏻🖖🏽

@textsfromstarfleet / textsfromstarfleet.tumblr.com

these r the voyages of the 🌟⛵ enterprise
5 year mission: explore strnge new worlds seek out new life+civilizations boldly go where no 1 has gone b4!
txts frm personnel of Starfleet(+the aliens) 😘 👽
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Reblogged tokidokifish
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attention this is your captain speaking chag sameach pesach to all celebrating and a reminder do not open the airlock to greet elijah the vulcan rabbinic council ruled that opening the door to the room where the seder is occurring is sufficient elijah can get on a starship just fine himself he just likes to be personally invited in to your seder we dont need another incident like last year thank you

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Reblogged blysse-and-blunder
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This is so so funny actually because for MOST of television's history, this was the standard. When I started learning screenwriting 25 years ago (OH GOD), it was still taught that you should be able to follow the plot of a television show while cooking dinner. Which didn't mean the characters described everything they were doing; it meant the writing tended to be more driven by dialogue than action and visuals.

Film, which started out a silent art form, drew its storytelling language from stage performance--plays, obviously, but also dance, opera, mime and circus. Early television drew its storytelling language from radio, and up until 20-25 years ago, the idea that a television show should require your full visual attention to be comprehensible wasn't the norm--in fact it was something you were actively discouraged from doing when learning to write for TV. When the Buffy episode "Hush" aired in 1999, they put a special notice after each commercial break to reassure you that your television wasn't broken--most of the episode just didn't have audible dialogue. It was considered groundbreaking enough that it was nominated for an Emmy.

What happened about 25 years ago is that the storytelling languages of film and television started converging, and TV, which plenty of people in the feature film world had looked down on, started being treated as serious medium for visual storytelling. Budgets increased, allowing more "cinematic" visuals to be possible; writers, directors and actors from the film world crossed over more often and the era of "Peak" or "Prestige" TV took off. Changes (not all of them positive) in both the feature film and television worlds meant that the gap between what you could do in a high-budget TV show and what you could do in a feature film basically vanished. At the same time, the home viewing experience got dramatically better, and over time, the expectation of television being a full-attention audio-visual experience all the time became the norm. (The thing that's filled the gap of "absorbing a story while cooking/cleaning/doing another activity"? Podcasts. AKA the medium formerly known as radio.)

Now as someone who loves immersive, visually-driven, full-attention-requiring television...I think any story should be told using whatever dramatic language is best suited to it. I don't have an ideological opposition to the concept of TV that doesn't require your full attention and I don't think that's "TV for stupid people" or "TV for people who hate TV." The question should be whether this particular story should be told in that manner or not.

I just think it's funny that today's studio and networks execs have really never had a single original idea in their lives.

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