Guess who they sell this awesome traffic to......I lost $1000 to this garbage. Every possible demographic option was enabled to prevent this from happening. Even better, foreign language learn your ABC's!
My kids were a little under 2 heading into election season. We watched very little television at that age but there was one YouTube show that would really help calm down one of them. Pretty much every time we watched that, we got a Trump ad. Yay living in Ohio!
Thankfully they've taken to some PBS shows like Daniel Tiger and Thomas, so they're usually content with that and we generally don't watch them on YouTube, so there isn't an recommended content. One time, I did put up a Thomas YouTube video on one screen with on of my sons in my lap, while I finished up 10 minutes worth of work on the other screen. That's how we got sucked into the "Bob the Train" vortex. Not good.
> Thankfully they've taken to some PBS shows like Daniel Tiger and Thomas
I recommend tracking down some old-school Mister Rogers' Neighborhood if you can. Totally engages my 4-year-old, and she actually talks to him when prompted, which she does with no other children's show. The pace is sedate and the shots long (like, really long, in a way I didn't appreciate as a kid—that had to be difficult to film).
They make Thomas and Daniel Tiger and most of the rest of the PBS lineup seem like Ren & Stimpy by comparison.
I agree completely. The long-takes, especially. Amazon Prime Video has a good collection of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood episodes. I'll find myself drawn in to the show in a way I'm not at all by any other kid's shows.
Incidentally, Fred Rogers went into television when it was figuring out what a kids show should be; YouTube Kids is in a similar situation now. I wish we had a modern-day visionary who could bring the calm, compassionate, thoughtful message of Mr. Rogers to the tablets and phones where kids are doing most of their watching.
It's so hard to know when something from your childhood was genuinely better than stuff today and when it's nostalgia talking, but on returning to it as an adult I'm pretty sure MRN is still the best kids' show anyone's made. And that Sesame Street was (way) better when the central character was the emotionally-more-mature but still-struggling-with-things Big Bird and not the chaotic neutral (but oh so lucrative) emotionally-a-2-year-old Elmo.
All television from the 60s and 70s had extremely long shots by today's standards.
Just for fun pick any show on any channel with modern content. Drama, comedy, even news broadcasts -- the average shot duration is only 3.5 seconds. SECONDS! Not only that, but the weird camera angles, and the infuriating "shakey cam" (handled camera being purposely jiggled) is predominant in children's programming, and used to keep our ever-decreasing focus. (It's a wonder that children today can focus long enough to ever read a single paragraph.)
Now, for comparison, watch an episode of Andy Griffith, or I Love Lucy, and marvel that one camera shot might be 3 minutes long.
What's with the extremely short shot duration? I noticed that in some movies too. It was incredibly frustrating. Is is some film technique to make me feel what it's like to be OCD?
I just assumed the movie was so poorly directed that they were left with stitching together a bunch of crap.
Let's say we have a sixty second shot, where two actors throw ten lines of dialogue back and forth at eachother. Let's say that one out of ten takes on a line is good.
It will take far more then ten minutes to film this. The actors may nail line #1 and #2, but flub #3 or #4, or #7 or look at the wrong thing, or the director won't like something about their emotions, or whatnot.
You have to do an entire re-take, whenever one little thing doesn't go as you want.
Compare that to a short-shot film. Have each actor fire off twenty takes of their four second line. If they got tongue-tied on the pronunciation of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, they didn't waste an entire take.
Hell, with short shots the two actors don't even need to be in the same building for filming a scene, let alone on the same set at the same time. Do takes for one on Monday, do takes for the other one on Tuesday. It works better for everyone's schedules, and we can't afford to pay Scarlett Johansson to hang out on set any longer then she has to. Three months later, the director will decide that they really hate one of the shots, and it can be re-filmed during post-production.
The reason that this happens is because filming is expensive, budgets are bloated, celebrity actors command multi-million dollar salaries, editing is easy, and audiences will happily lap up action schlock like Michael Bay's Transformers (With its average of 3.2 seconds per shot.)
My SO works in musical theater. They don't have the privilege of stitching together a show from perfect four second intervals. They have to perform it right from start to finish - a two hour ordeal. This requires many, many weeks of grueling rehearsals... And each performance has many, many mistakes.
Is that purely a development (not advance, mind) of aesthetic and style, or is it in part because editing with ultra-frequent cuts is much faster and cheaper now than it was then, do you think?
