Do we see this?
Feb. 19th, 2007 12:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethStill 'Studying Plays'
There's a section on props and the flexibility and transformation of associated meanings.
Their example: Two bits of wood nailed together can be a sword, or a cross, and by convention the audience accepts that.
These transformations can bring different meanings into association.
So, applying that to television.
The dominant convention on TV is ... bugger, naturalism or realism? Or both. Or something.
(I hate it when I start out sounding smart and it goes away).
What I mean is
On television it's accepted that the way to do things is to make things look like they're real. Like that's a real room you could really walk into and pick things up and the buttons would all work and stuff. You don't tend to get two bits of wood nailed together except on children's TV, and I haven't watched that in so long it may have ceased to be true there as well. Which would be a loss. You can get different effects out of some of the cool stuff I remember from kids shows, like watercolor backgrounds and animations you can wander into.
So when TV does something like have a shiny bit of angular plastic and call it alien, we reckon we see an actual alien object, as put together by the props department. And then if it looks a bit shonky we reckon it was either meant to be a shonky cheap alien or the props department ran out of budget. We're reading it as if they're trying to be realistic, somehow, even when they're completely totally making things up.
I mean, on many levels, it wouldn't hurt the story if they had a post it note that says "This is alien tech. Got it? Good."
Whilst acting they sometimes *do*, or at least the Myfanwy shaped equivalent.
What I was thinking though is how assumptions about budget and reading conventions can interact.
Wardrobe, for instance. Is a bit of a bugger. In Buffy I can read it and get actual meaning out, to the point I can make predictions based on what people are wearing and they stand up. Not 100%, obviously, but to a fun degree. I can associate colors with themes, emotions, characters, teams, and places. It's a useful meaning carrier.
Highlander? If I try to look at it that closely? Makes my *head* hurt.
There's this one pair of earrings looks like a vase that every blonde woman in the first two seasons wears. Seriously. If you try and get realistic/plausible in 'verse explanations for it they get really *bizarre*. You basically just have to accept that the wardrobe department had only that one pair of dressy earrings and pretend we don't see them.
But other times it's borderline, or there's a story that stands out and actually does things on purpose with the parts we usually aren't seeing. Like, sometimes shared clothes means they have a clothing budget somewhat smaller than my personal one, and other times they mean that a character wants to be the other character when they grow up. Other times they may or may not mean the characters in question were shagging, depending on what goggles you're wearing. I think there's one jumper that would, by that rule, indicate that the entire male recurring cast were, on occasion, ending up in situations where they needed to borrow a fresh set of clothes. It's either headache inducing or slash bait, depending.
Torchwood?
Has it's own 'do we see this' moments. Aplenty.
Like, there's one shirt that either all the men have worn or all the men have their own version of. Do we see that? Did they just need something clean and light blue? Or are they dressing them similarly to make some kind of thematic statement? Or does it indicate they're actually borrowing clothes from each other? Or, and this is where it gets headachey much, is it some complicated mixture of all of them, and we need to switch codes between scenes?
Then there's props. Alien props cost money. So, if a prop gets re-used, is the *object* reused, do we see it in both places? Or do we assume they have a budget to stretch and call them entirely seperate things?
Tosh and the door opener.
There's an item that is associated with Tosh in two early episodes, looks identical, but has dialogue cues that it's unfamiliar to her the second time and does different things. Which to rely on? Well you can handwave and say she didn't see how reading a book would be useful in their current situation and then she knows the item but not the use, which makes it the same. Easy. But... did they mean that? And if not, why reuse it?
So I was thinking, transforming meanings means associating them.
Book scanner and computer interface / really fancy skeleton key
stolen knowledge / secured doors
knowledge / opens doors
... useful.
... and all associated with Tosh.
Plus then when Tosh goes missing pastwards, Owen uses the same thing to look for the way to come get her, only he uses it as a key and it opens an empty safe, so it turns out a bit useless in that way.
One vaguely wonders about it's data backup capacities and what it had been reading lately.
But then everything important on my laptop computer is also on two or three different memory sticks too.
(Because my notes fit into convenient memory sticks now. All my notes. And all my fiction. That I've ever written. The expanding capacity of computers is *amazing*.)
(Course my artwork is a whole other story, and if I worked in vid that would be something else again, but.)
I think the problem is that sometimes you need a set of reading tools and sometimes you get static from them instead, and not everyone finds it fun applying different tools to see what they get.
Also, once you start noticing earrings, it gets really really irritating.
Well, to me.
Sometimes.
YMMV.
... I still have 40 pages to read and I keep stopping every two or three to do this to Torchwood. I'm not even doing the suggested exercises to Torchwood, which one suspects would be quite useful. But half of them require use of drama text and we only get the performance text from TV so it don't quite work.
There's a section on props and the flexibility and transformation of associated meanings.
Their example: Two bits of wood nailed together can be a sword, or a cross, and by convention the audience accepts that.
These transformations can bring different meanings into association.
So, applying that to television.
The dominant convention on TV is ... bugger, naturalism or realism? Or both. Or something.
(I hate it when I start out sounding smart and it goes away).
What I mean is
On television it's accepted that the way to do things is to make things look like they're real. Like that's a real room you could really walk into and pick things up and the buttons would all work and stuff. You don't tend to get two bits of wood nailed together except on children's TV, and I haven't watched that in so long it may have ceased to be true there as well. Which would be a loss. You can get different effects out of some of the cool stuff I remember from kids shows, like watercolor backgrounds and animations you can wander into.
So when TV does something like have a shiny bit of angular plastic and call it alien, we reckon we see an actual alien object, as put together by the props department. And then if it looks a bit shonky we reckon it was either meant to be a shonky cheap alien or the props department ran out of budget. We're reading it as if they're trying to be realistic, somehow, even when they're completely totally making things up.
I mean, on many levels, it wouldn't hurt the story if they had a post it note that says "This is alien tech. Got it? Good."
Whilst acting they sometimes *do*, or at least the Myfanwy shaped equivalent.
What I was thinking though is how assumptions about budget and reading conventions can interact.
Wardrobe, for instance. Is a bit of a bugger. In Buffy I can read it and get actual meaning out, to the point I can make predictions based on what people are wearing and they stand up. Not 100%, obviously, but to a fun degree. I can associate colors with themes, emotions, characters, teams, and places. It's a useful meaning carrier.
Highlander? If I try to look at it that closely? Makes my *head* hurt.
There's this one pair of earrings looks like a vase that every blonde woman in the first two seasons wears. Seriously. If you try and get realistic/plausible in 'verse explanations for it they get really *bizarre*. You basically just have to accept that the wardrobe department had only that one pair of dressy earrings and pretend we don't see them.
But other times it's borderline, or there's a story that stands out and actually does things on purpose with the parts we usually aren't seeing. Like, sometimes shared clothes means they have a clothing budget somewhat smaller than my personal one, and other times they mean that a character wants to be the other character when they grow up. Other times they may or may not mean the characters in question were shagging, depending on what goggles you're wearing. I think there's one jumper that would, by that rule, indicate that the entire male recurring cast were, on occasion, ending up in situations where they needed to borrow a fresh set of clothes. It's either headache inducing or slash bait, depending.
Torchwood?
Has it's own 'do we see this' moments. Aplenty.
Like, there's one shirt that either all the men have worn or all the men have their own version of. Do we see that? Did they just need something clean and light blue? Or are they dressing them similarly to make some kind of thematic statement? Or does it indicate they're actually borrowing clothes from each other? Or, and this is where it gets headachey much, is it some complicated mixture of all of them, and we need to switch codes between scenes?
Then there's props. Alien props cost money. So, if a prop gets re-used, is the *object* reused, do we see it in both places? Or do we assume they have a budget to stretch and call them entirely seperate things?
Tosh and the door opener.
There's an item that is associated with Tosh in two early episodes, looks identical, but has dialogue cues that it's unfamiliar to her the second time and does different things. Which to rely on? Well you can handwave and say she didn't see how reading a book would be useful in their current situation and then she knows the item but not the use, which makes it the same. Easy. But... did they mean that? And if not, why reuse it?
So I was thinking, transforming meanings means associating them.
Book scanner and computer interface / really fancy skeleton key
stolen knowledge / secured doors
knowledge / opens doors
... useful.
... and all associated with Tosh.
Plus then when Tosh goes missing pastwards, Owen uses the same thing to look for the way to come get her, only he uses it as a key and it opens an empty safe, so it turns out a bit useless in that way.
One vaguely wonders about it's data backup capacities and what it had been reading lately.
But then everything important on my laptop computer is also on two or three different memory sticks too.
(Because my notes fit into convenient memory sticks now. All my notes. And all my fiction. That I've ever written. The expanding capacity of computers is *amazing*.)
(Course my artwork is a whole other story, and if I worked in vid that would be something else again, but.)
I think the problem is that sometimes you need a set of reading tools and sometimes you get static from them instead, and not everyone finds it fun applying different tools to see what they get.
Also, once you start noticing earrings, it gets really really irritating.
Well, to me.
Sometimes.
YMMV.
... I still have 40 pages to read and I keep stopping every two or three to do this to Torchwood. I'm not even doing the suggested exercises to Torchwood, which one suspects would be quite useful. But half of them require use of drama text and we only get the performance text from TV so it don't quite work.