If you've ever wondered why every poster and every trailer and every TV spot looks exactly the same, it's because of testing. It's because anything interesting scores poorly and gets kicked out.
This is talking about TV but is applicable to everything; in the modern digital/computerized age, "data" is everything. Everything is measured and tracked, whether it's sales or Instagram likes. The result is always choosing what sells the best, trending towards the same, boring average.
This phenomena gets more interesting when you considering increasingly global markets for things like TV and movies. For example, I read about ten years ago (so I don’t have the source, sorry), that humor in big Hollywood movies has been transitioning from dialogue to visual humor because the latter is much easier to translate for a global audience.
Something I noticed before I found that article was also that, at least in my anecdotal experience is that older movies often had quicker moving dialog (characters talked faster, talked over each other, etc.). I’ve wondered if that’s been just a style choice or driven by the global market as well, since slowing dialog down makes it easier for non-native speakers to follow and presumably makes translation easier.
Comments
This is talking about TV but is applicable to everything; in the modern digital/computerized age, "data" is everything. Everything is measured and tracked, whether it's sales or Instagram likes. The result is always choosing what sells the best, trending towards the same, boring average.
This phenomena gets more interesting when you considering increasingly global markets for things like TV and movies. For example, I read about ten years ago (so I don’t have the source, sorry), that humor in big Hollywood movies has been transitioning from dialogue to visual humor because the latter is much easier to translate for a global audience.
Something I noticed before I found that article was also that, at least in my anecdotal experience is that older movies often had quicker moving dialog (characters talked faster, talked over each other, etc.). I’ve wondered if that’s been just a style choice or driven by the global market as well, since slowing dialog down makes it easier for non-native speakers to follow and presumably makes translation easier.
I'm really not sure about the humor. Take a look at "Every Frame a Painting: Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FOzD4Sfgag