THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 2, 1994 TAG: 9408020006
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
A pace for everything and everything moving at its (appropriate) pace?
You'd think so. But I can name a couple of situations, both involving attempts to communicate something or other, where the pacing is consistently off: too slow in one case and much too fast in the other.
One slowdown that irks is the automated telephone response where, instead of getting an immediate chance to ask a question or report a problem, the dialer is offered the choice of oodles of buttons to push but never this option: ``If you're in a hurry and want to escape all this rigmarole, push Button Dah Dah for connection to a real, live person.'' I had something to say earlier about getting lost in the phone-button swamp, but the molasses slowness of it all - the sheer waste of the caller's time - deserves some separate mention.
At the other end of the scale, where speed outruns good sense, we have the high velocity with which information about a movie is flashed to the audience at the end of a film or in a preview of a coming attraction.
My wife and I are addicted to movie credits - who had which job, where the story was shot, all that kind of thing - and as I wrote some time ago, we like to hang around after the show to read them. Much of the time, though, our pleasure is hit or miss, owing to that problem of pace. The credits appear for milliseconds, just too swiftly for the eye and brain to snag more than an occasional item.
I can see only two purposes for the credits: One is to give the viewer a bit of extra entertainment or useful information. The other is to reward the various members of the movie team with public acknowledgment of their skills or their roles. Both purposes are defeated if the any of the data zips by too quickly for the audience to read with at least a smidgen of com-pre-hen-sion.
Also - one of the major communication failures in this cinematic arena occurs when the promoters splash across the screen one of those dense packages of printed data about some movie soon to be shown. I have never seen one of these displayed long enough to allow the reading of more than one or two of the finely printed names of performers, directors, original story, etc. I even make a game of trying to spot the name of the coming attraction before the blurb disappears.
Worse yet is the reading problem with scrolling credits or the flashing on and off of advance movie data when the pictures come to us via our television sets. It's almost as if the managers of such presentations crank up the speed of the credits a notch or two from the moviehouse rate just to save time for more ads.
But in the case of the eye-numbing whoosh of movie credits on the home screen, I guess we can be philosophical.
Much of that printed matter, even if it weren't racing by, is too small to read anyhow. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star. by CNB