Caption does all the talking?: Advertised Extra

As someone who hasn't seen the movie, I have no way to tell that the shirtless guy with wings "is the focus of two scenes and has less dialogue than any given one of the characters he is obscuring" other than the caption itself.

Voting not picturable.

Yeah, not picturable. Anything we use is going to be a comic that's very wordy.

I think the caption is excused in this case because it's inherently non-picturable without one.

I think the current image plus caption actually do add something to the page by illustrating how the trope works. It's a bit hard to get a handle on the trope without an image like that, with all the poster iconography saying "Important Guy!"

edited 30th Dec '10 8:10:59 AM by suedenim

Yes, but isn't the de facto ruling in that situation is to leave out a picture? If the caption has to do all of the work, it doesn't work as a picture.

The image demonstrates the character featuring prominently in advertising. The caption clarifies that he doesn't appear in the film. So the image is probably doing at least 40% of the work here.

I think it would work even better if it had him dead center or something.

My only nitpick is that the caption is too long; would it be possible to condense it into something like "That winged guy has only ten minutes of screentime" or something like that?

Agree.

I found an objectively better image.

Great. Swap em.

It is done. Is 350 pixels too wide? I keep forgetting.

Never mind. My mistake.

edited 30th Dec '10 5:27:28 PM by Madrugada

Oh, okay then.

edited 30th Dec '10 5:28:41 PM by AngryScientist

I replaced it with a smaller one, 250px. It could be smaller still; whether the max width is 350px or 330px, not every image needs to be max size. That looks fine at 200px even, and nothing is rendered illegible. The article is short, a smaller image looks better.

I like 300px as a "big" image because that's what the forum shrinks images to; I only do 330px if it helps. Image resolution makes a big difference to file size, and a small but measurable difference to page loading time, also.

edited 30th Dec '10 5:54:13 PM by rodneyAnonymous

I hate to be the naysayer, but I actually think that's a worse image. That sort of "character focus poster" has become increasingly common, and you might see six or seven of them for a movie with a large cast. Such a marketing campaign doesn't necessarily imply that they're equally important. The actual X-Men 3 movie poster, OTOH, gives the clear visual impression that the Angel is one of the 3 most important characters in the movie.

Another example of the same sort of ad campaign here. The existence of a Black Widow character poster for Iron Man 2 doesn't mean she's an example of this trope. In the actual one-sheet, she looks like the supporting character she is.

Hm, that is a compelling argument to use the X3 cast poster◊, and not the one with Angel alone◊.

Black Widow actually had a decent sized part in Iron Man 2.

True. I'm not trying to make a direct analogy, just saying that an "individual character focus" poster campaign isn't the same thing as the movie's official one-sheet. The character focus sheet is slightly misleading: "The Angel looks like a significant supporting character according to this ad campaign, but in fact is a minor supporting character."

The one-sheet is "The Angel looks like one of the three main stars of this movie, but in fact is a minor supporting character."

I'd be fine with the X3 cast poster.

Bump

I'd thought about bumping this one last week...can't really make up my mind now if I like the cast poster or the current pic.

Bump...how do we want to resolve this?

X3 is an okay example, but it only works when you know that Angel does pretty much squat in the movie. I feel like I've seen lampshades of this in Cracked movie parody posters...

Clock is set.