Is Bigger Better?

Good morning all you blog readers! Today's blog will be one made of pure awesomeness...

Well, no it won't. It'll be like all the others, it'll have bits that make you laugh (hopefully) and bits that make you think "You're not as intelligent as you think you are Brawny..."

But seriously. Over the weekend, which I spent once again with the wonderful Neety, we ended up having a conversation as to whether her new blog entry "MEN: Your Best Feature (Part 1/5)" was too long. Now just to clarify, we weren't wondering whether the 5 parts would be too long, this discussion was about part one (although, how impressive is it that she PLANS blogs in 5 parts? I barely plan mine at all before I start rambling!)

And it got me to thinking. As a fast reader (And I'm not kidding, when I was about 10 I did the whole of the Chronicles of Narnia in a day, when the last Harry Potter book came out I read it in two and a half hours), I'm a big fan of long blogs. Because if they're interesting (or at least semi-interesting at least) then I read them and they occupy a few minutes of my time, as opposed to a few seconds.

And I'm the same for other forms of entertainment. Put two DVDs in front of me, both films I want to watch equally, both priced the same, and tell me to choose one, it'll be whichever is longer / has the most special features. Anything that adds value for money to it. I originally balked at the idea of buying the Family Guy: Blue Harvest DVD when it was originally announced it'd be selling as an individual DVD - Pay for a DVD with only 43 minutes of episode?? What a rip-off! But of course it's not. If you want to see it. Which I did. Now they did bulk it up with special features so that I didn't feel quite so ripped off, but it seems to be an in-built part of me, that things generally can't be too long.

Many people moaned in reviews about Funny People, which I saw in the cinema a couple of months ago, that it was too long. Not a problem for me at all, it held my attention and I laughed throughout it. Which underlines my point. What is too long? Is Bigger always Better?

Well no. Not always. On Thursday night I had the wonderful (mis-)fortune to have to see a film that had been shot by a "professional" with some of the students from one of the courses at work. (Apologies for being quite so vague, but with recent stories about people getting sacked for posting innapropriate tweets/blogs about sensitive workplaces, I am not taking any chances!). The original brief for this film was that it should be a promotional film to highlight what the students do on the course. What we ended up with was a half hour documentary, which, frankly, could easily have had 10 minutes cut from it, and not been any worse, in fact, it probably would have been better.

Going back to my opening story, my response to Neety was that I thought that it was a good length and that she shouldn't worry about it. Because I enjoy reading long, well-written blogs, just as I enjoy reading books, magazine articles, graphic novels etc...

So do I think everything should be longer? Bigger? Well no. If the film last Thursday had been bigger I might have gone on a mad rampage and torn up the screen, if the extended film of "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" was any longer, I'd have fallen asleep in it more times than I already have, and if all Books had to be at least 1000 pages or more, a lot of books would be full of filler and bad writing. (A bit like this blog, I apologise for that, my defence is it's a Monday morning).

In my eyes, things have an ideal length. And that length should be obvious. For example, if I had an album of music which I enjoyed casually in a background noise kind of way, but was only 30 minutes long, I'd probably think was too short. However, the Wildhearts album "The Wildhearts must be Destroyed" (which is excellent) is only about 30 minutes, but it feels complete when you listen to it.

I myself fell victim to this trend when making "Norwich and Saggers: Smarter than the Average Bear" (to watch it on Youtube - CLICK HERE) I had written the script, and it felt the right length, and when I edited it, it mostly felt the right length, except for the improvised "Gruntfuttock" sequences, which seem to me now to be obvious padding....

So all of you writers / creators of artistic events/items/recordings/etc... my suggestion? Be aware of how long your final product FEELS like it should be. And make it that length. Don't try to pad out a 60 minute film to 90 minutes just because that's how long you think a film should be. Don't write a 10 chapter story and then add another 6 of extraneous rubbish just because you want it to look more impressive. When you've reached the end, it's the end.

And I promise, on my part, that I'll stop worrying so much about how long things are, and just enjoy the ride.

(Oh, and be impressed, I made it all the way through a blog entitled "Is Bigger Better?" without making ANY innuendos. :D )