Media Blog #3 - “Design I Like”
Media design is everywhere. It’s on our cereal boxes, in our movies, and on our clothes. We can’t escape it, but we don’t mind. We like it.
One bit of design I’ve always enjoyed is the opening sequence to the 1999 comedy, Galaxy Quest.
The movie starts out with us, the viewers, dropped into the middle of an action sequence of a campy Star Trek type setting. The colors are all too sharp, the film is a little too fuzzy, too warm, everyone’s makeup is too harsh, and the acting is overdone (when the ship is attacked they all fall—every-so-enthusiastically—sideways). The dramatic music climbs, the crew panics, the captain makes a split second decision, and suddenly, a huge To Be Continued… appears on screen.
Only then do we hear the applause and the over-the-top MC start talking about the 1982 hit TV Series Galaxy Quest, as the camera pulls back to reveals a cult convention of epic proportions, with costumed aliens and kitsch merchandise as far as the eye can see. We are suddenly very aware that what we watched was in the past, and that this is the present. The camera cuts to back stage where we see those same, once-famed actors now aged, jaded, and depressed, sitting, milling about, and overall washed up, complaining about each other, the show, and their lives in general.
What we’ve been watching was not the movie per say, but a lead in to it. Within the first few sequences, just from the lighting composition, directing, and feel of the film in the first sequence, we know what we are watching is a mockup of an old campy space TV show. They don’t confirm it till after the cut away, but they don’t even have to. We KNOW. The convention and back stage cutaways also adds to it, showing us just how extensively the time jump was; that what we were watching—once glowing and successful in the past—now has trapped this cult-beloved, intrepid crew of actors into a lifetime of character acting parts and comic conventions.
We don’t know ANYTHING about the plot of the movie as of yet, but with the lighting, makeup, color composition, and a few seconds of acting, the entire character structure is completely set up just in those first 5 minutes. All thanks to media design.
If anyone is so inclined, here is the scene I'm talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVAFMrHHoxQ
Enjoy! :)
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