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That's an example that proves the opposite of your point.

You may notice if you watch some older movies (pre-1950s, mostly) that they used to run the ENTIRE credits list at the start of the film. The WHOLE THING. Not just the credits you see at the beginning today, but also all the ones that today are listed at the END of the movie, too. The copyright notices for all the songs they used, the logos for their camera and film providers, the names of all the gaffers and best boys and Assistants To Mr. Bigshot... you had to sit through them all before the movie got underway.

They don't do that anymore. Today only a very small number of Very Important People get credited before the start of the movie. Everyone else gets shunted to the end. Why? The answer is TV. When TV came along and movies started getting shown there, they no longer had a captive audience. The audience could now change the channel if they weren't being entertained -- which meant that there was pressure on the filmmakers to GET ON WITH THE DAMN MOVIE. So they moved nearly all the credits to run after the film, rather than before.

That was a bit of a blow to all those other folks, of course, since credits at the end of a movie are credits nobody reads -- they're too busy leaving the theater or changing the channel. But it was necessary to conform to the audience's desire that they GET ON WITH THE DAMN MOVIE.

Which is Thomas' point: users' expectations are changing. Used to be that it didn't matter that much if your app was slow to load, because users didn't expect it to be fast. But the proliferation of mobile devices and lightweight apps is changing those expectations. So if you care about your users and want to hold on to them, it behooves you to GET ON WITH THE DAMN APPLICATION.




Actually, when I have watched a movie or played a video game that I have especially enjoyed I often make a point of watching the entire credits.

I find it fascinating to see the number of different skills that are required to get something like that from a drawing board idea to a shipped product.

Not to mention that sometimes they add some kind of extra "easter egg" content right after the credits as a bonus for watching right through.


Thanks for sharing that, I learned something new today already :).

You can see the progression even over the last 10-20 years. We used to see the title of the movie, and then a few minutes of scenery with the actor's names on them. These days it's not uncommon for the movie to start almost immediately with the credits integrated into various background elements.


Yeah, as audiences' attention spans get ever shorter the pressure to GET ON WITH THE DAMN MOVIE gets ever higher, so filmmakers are always looking for ways to pare down the length of the opening credits or to present them in a way that also starts the story moving.

The same evolution has been underway for a couple of decades now with TV shows. Until the early 1990s it was commonplace for TV sitcoms to have a full opening credits reel, complete with a theme song just for that show. Think of the opening of Mary Tyler Moore [1] from back in the '70s, for instance, or Cheers [2] from the '80s; they both became iconic representations of those shows.

These intros helped set the tone of the show that followed them. But they generally took a full minute to run, and as the universe of options provided by cable expanded and remote controls became inexpensive, waiting that extra minute for the show to start began to turn off viewers. The push began to GET ON WITH THE DAMN SHOW, and so the traditional musical opening first shrank, then disappeared altogether. Today's openings run much shorter -- 25 seconds max -- and usually include just a couple of title cards and a musical snippet.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m4-Te1m7fY

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD8ljNobUys




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