Filler is material of lower cost or quality that is used to fill a certain television time slot or physical medium, such as a music album.

Television

In the early days of television, most output was live. The hours of broadcast were limited and so a

test card A test card, also known as a test pattern or start-up/closedown test, is a television test signal, typically broadcast at times when the transmitter is active but no program is being broadcast (often at sign-on and sign-off). Used since the ea ...

was commonly broadcast at other times. When a breakdown happened during a live broadcast, a standard recording filled in. On the BBC, a film of a

potter's wheel In pottery, a potter's wheel is a machine used in the shaping (known as throwing) of clay into round ceramic ware. The wheel may also be used during the process of trimming excess clay from leather-hard dried ware that is stiff but malleable, ...

was often used for this purpose, filmed at the

Compton Potters' Arts Guild The Compton Potters' Arts Guild was an art pottery, founded by and based at the Surrey home of Scottish artist, Mary Fraser Tytler. Background A follower of the Home Arts and Industries Association, set up by Earl Brownlow in 1885 to encourag ...

. Similar short films, such as a kitten playing, were also used as interludes or interstitial programs to fill gaps in TV schedules. In the United States, these have their roots in the old Saturday afternoon horror movies hosted on independent stations. The fishcam is a particularly widespread form of filler in this tradition. In

anime is Traditional animation, hand-drawn and computer animation, computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, in Japan and in Japane ...

, most of the time filler arcs are due to the higher rate at which episodes are released than the original manga, from which the anime draws its source material from. Notable anime to feature high amount of filler include ''

Dragon Ball Z ''Dragon Ball Z'' is a Japanese anime television series produced by Toei Animation. Part of the ''Dragon Ball'' media franchise, it is the sequel to the 1986 '' Dragon Ball'' anime series and adapts the latter 325 chapters of the original ...

'', ''

Naruto ''Naruto'' is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Masashi Kishimoto. It tells the story of Naruto Uzumaki, a young ninja who seeks recognition from his peers and dreams of becoming the Hokage, the leader of his village. T ...

'' and ''

Bleach Bleach is the generic name for any chemical product that is used industrially or domestically to remove color (whitening) from a fabric or fiber or to clean or to remove stains in a process called bleaching. It often refers specifically, to ...

''.Northrop Davis
''Manga and Anime Go to Hollywood''
�— Bloomsbury, 2015, ISBN 9781623560386, page 650: "Filler arcs: anime series often „get ahead“ of the manga story on which they are based due to the faster rate anime is produced for TV. .. To combat this, the anime producers may have to create their own arcs to stall for time while the mangaka and their team catches up."

Music albums

Albums of music were typically of a set size determined by the physical medium such as the

vinyl record A phonograph record (also known as a gramophone record, especially in British English), or simply a record, is an analog sound storage medium in the form of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove. The groove usually starts ne ...

(typically 22 minutes per side) or CD (maximum 80 minutes). It was normal, especially in the 1960s, for artists to attempt to "pad out" their material to the standard length by including filler tracks of lesser quality. Often songs written by the artists or the producer of an album were included as filler and/or released on the

b-side The A-side and B-side are the two sides of phonograph records and cassettes; these terms have often been printed on the labels of two-sided music recordings. The A-side usually features a recording that its artist, producer, or record compan ...

of singles to generate more royalties for the songwriter or artist.

Cover version In popular music, a cover version, cover song, remake, revival, or simply cover, is a new performance or recording by a musician other than the original performer or composer of the song. Originally, it referred to a version of a song relea ...

s are often considered to be fillers, though this judgement varies with the amount of creative interpretation and adaption of the original. Similarly, live recordings, demo versions or

remix A remix (or reorchestration) is a piece of media which has been altered or contorted from its original state by adding, removing, or changing pieces of the item. A song, piece of artwork, book, video, poem, or photograph can all be remixes. The o ...

es follow the same argument. On the subject of music downloads,

Courtney Love Courtney Michelle Love (née Harrison; born July 9, 1964) is an American singer, guitarist, songwriter, and actress. A figure in the alternative and grunge scenes of the 1990s, her career has spanned four decades. She rose to prominence as ...

told the Digital Hollywood conference "If you're afraid of your own filler then I bet you're afraid of

Napster Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Sha ...

", meaning that other artists may be afraid of listeners being able to listen to a full album before buying it.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Filler (Media) Television terminology Interstitial television shows

Television

Music albums

See also

References