Decca
For the viewer obsessed with lists, lists and more list.
Decca is a channel
that is targeted towards the viewer with a short attention span, addicted
to little tidbits of pop culture information. It is geared towards people who
are attracted
to Random Notes in Rolling Stone magazine, the People and Places section of
People Magazine,
Entertainment Weekly’s Hot Sheet, and the endless Top 10 lists in popular
media. Constructed
as quick reads, these lists are one of the most prevalent ways of attracting,
entertaining
and influencing mass culture.
As programming, these top ten lists have an embedded sense of drama in its linear
structure,
an anxious anticipation to get to number one. Decca plays on this anticipation
and mass
cultures love for bite-sized morsels of pop facts, trivia, and information.
The top ten lists
that appear on Decca range from the obvious to the unexpected. All shows appearing
on Decca
are limited to 15 minutes in length. Interspliced between programming are the
everyday people,
taken “off the street”, one minute interviews listing their top ten
lists of their interest.
The channel appeals
to a wide audience, specifically towards the urban, hip, twenty and thirty
“somethings”. In approaching the subject matter, I wanted to avoid
the expected language referring
to chartsor list. The problem centered on avoiding this, and secondly, creating
a sense of anticipation
for the viewer, a quality inherent in the structure of top ten lists. I was
interested in using certain banal,
universal experiences and connecting them to my content. At the same time I
wanted the spots to have
an irreverent, humorous or playful quality, which I envisioned as part of the
channel’s spirit.
The following pages present the three different television spots I created for
the channel.