ideas: interactive DVD credits

Movie credits roll on and on, often taking three pop songs to complete. They're often illegible on a standard-res TV.

Imagine if instead you could highlight any credit, and pressing a button would jump to a point in the film.

• For cast you would see a key scene with the actor, as some credits already show non-interactively.
• For technical crew you would see that person's highlight scene. No more wondering "What scene did CoolFXHouseFunkyFresh animate?" or "Why is Hollywood Animal Trainers credited when there were no animals?", you'd see it.
  
• For songs on the soundtrack you'd jump to the point in the movie where the song plays.

That last one would be especially useful. Often I see songs in the credits that I have no recollection of hearing during the movie. I'm not going to replay the whole movie just to check out a song that might only play for two bars.

Everyone working on the movie gets more recognition for their work, soundtrack songs are better promoted which translates into more sales, and the credits are far more interesting and informative for viewers. A win all around.

Based on my limited understanding of DVD authoring, it would be hard to implement this as the movie credits scroll. It would be easy to do it as an interactive Credits menu, it's just like the Scene Selection menu on DVDs. You could also do a non-interactive credits extra where as each name rolls by, a scene from the movie displays.

If movie playback had a scripting interface (another idea coming soon), then you could play movie snippets under scripting control from a nice HTML or Flash interface . That interface would also avoid the stupid problem of illegible movie credit fonts.

This idea is worth ONE MILLION DOLLARS, but I release it to the world for free.