The trend toward basing creative endeavors on templates has been a trend for many years, culminating in Hollywood’s use of its history as templates for its current production.
Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on whether you value your personal creativity, or you’re pushing a budget to get a project finished.
Thanks to Curtis Fritsch for editing the show and making us sound intelligent.
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Regarding Terence’s contention that so much is unoriginal and a mashup of what came before, I wish to refer you to Kirby Ferguson’s excellent “Everything is a Remix” series: http://www.everythingisaremix.info/
Templates do serve to give us common references in visual language though.
Take the dissolve; imagine if you had to come up with a unique way of visually showing the passage of time or space for every film.
It’s so common that no one thinks of it as a template anymore, it’s just a part of film language.
I don’t consider language to be templates. That would apply to the language of film also in which a dissolve is part of the language used to communicate.
Everything in media has been based on what came before from the beginning, this is nothing new. See the 45 minute video “Pollinate: Chain Reaction”.