By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide
Okay, I'll admit it. Sometimes I'm just plain creeped out by some of the changes I've seen over the last couple of years as far as digital technology is concerned. This is particularly true in movies, games, and television special effects. For some reason or other, the old analog cut-and-paste effects were comfortably fake-y. If you are an aficionado of Ray Harryhausen's films, you love and enjoy the giant Cyclops in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, because, well...it's obviously a bit of stop-motion animation.
Fake-y but Lovable!
He isn't exactly Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but it's patently obvious that he is eight inches tall.
While watching an episode of I Love the 90s! the other day, I saw a video of the Weezer song "Buddy Holly." You know the one...by a series of clever cuts, the band appears to be playing at Al's restaurant in the 70s television show Happy Days. The illusion is unconvincing albeit clever. No digital technology was used.
Weezer in Happier Days
(An interesting aside: the Weezer video shipped as an extra surprise feature on the install CD of Microsoft Windows 95. If you have an old disc lying around, check it out.)
Now, in the digital age, just about anything is possible. If you want to make a James Bond movie, you could conceivably digitally reconstruct a young Sean Connery (perhaps that's what Daniel Craig is). You want to do a new version of Hamlet? How about digitally reconstructing Laurence Oliver? (They did it in the crappy movie Sky Captain and the Blurry World of Tomorrow, and I'm told that caretakers in Westminster Abbey could hear Lord Larry rolling in his grave).
And this is where things get really creepy. If you were watching the Golden Globes on TV the other night, you were treated to an absolute horror show during one of the commercial breaks. It was an Orville Redenbacher commercial, starring none other than Orville Redenbacher. Nothing odd about that, except that he's been dead for fifteen years! If you haven't seen it on TV yet, you can witness the entire nightmare online at http://www.orville.com/aboutUs.jsp.
Note the IPOD!
We need no ghost from beyond the grave to tell us about popcorn! It is the very realism of the video that makes it disturbing; there is no comfortable fakeness in the thing, just a dead man jabbering away about microwave popcorn. Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of the digital revolution and what can be comfortably called digital fidelity, but let's be a little more selective about how it's used!
Man … that's just creepy.
