Design I Like: infoMania Opening Sequence

Opening sequence starts at the :29 mark. Watch in HQ for full effect. Have the sound on.




infoMania is a weekly clips show on Current TV. Its presentation consists of commentators, often in front of a green screen, making comedy and satire out of an overwhelming glut of varied mediums, focusing on television, the internet, and magazines. Clips are rapidly edited together, to keep up with the fast pace of the jokes.
The opening sequence of a show should serve to preview both the content and the style of the program that follows it, and this short but powerful sequence does so effectively. It captures the overwhelming feeling of attempting to stay on top of contemporary pop culture. It does this through innovative composition and imitative typography.
The sequence is only 18 seconds long, but its composition spans a ridiculous scale. It begins zoomed into what looks like a web page on Wikipedia. It is not an actual screen shot, however, just an imitation- made perfectly believable by the use of the same font that Wikipedia uses. It then zooms out, again and again, showing more and more of a world that is completely filled with modern media devices, from cell phones and LED screens to Times Square billboards and blimp displays, with believable fonts. Each zoomed out shot reveals more devices as it goes. Each screen, that looked real, is then zoomed out of to reveal that it was really just an image on a screen, itself- an advanced, motion-picture version of the still image compositional technique called mise en abyme. The end shot is of the entire earth, made up of an incomplete image with the text, "Still Loading."
The furious pace of the continuous zooming out, timed with the rhythm of the music, creates a rushing feeling in the viewer, emphasizing the overwhelming nature of the amount of varied media we are surrounded by. This glut of information and misinformation can be disconcerting, but on this show, it is instead an endless source of humor.