“I can’t believe my eyes”.
Good plan. The days of believing your eyes have gone or are, at best, in serious trouble.
In the last couple of weeks alone:
Jeff Goldblum is dead – fell off a cliff in NZ. No he isn’t, no he didn’t. Oh.
An email was sent proving that the PM did untoward things for a car dealer. No it wasn’t. Gasp.
Photos were found in the floating wreckage of Air France flight 447 showing that the tail section had been torn off. No they weren’t. Cripes.
Whatever happened to the good old days when there was a thing called photographic evidence? Gone. In the almost good old days the doctored image was easy to spot. The shadow fell the wrong way. The neck on the transplanted head was bigger than the neck on the body. There was truck in the distance of the fake moonscape. Easy to pick like spot the difference in a child’s comic.
But now the work done with image manipulation software is faultless. That elephant really does have a duck’s head. Stunt plane’s really do land with one wing missing. Naughty taggers really do scale fences and scrawl graffiti on Airforce One.
“I don’t know what to believe any more”. Don’t fret, neither does anybody else. The Brazilian TV network believed the fake Air France crash photos.
The Channel 9 newsroom believed the Jeff Goldblum cliff fall story. Tens of thousands of people virally spread the amazing stunt plane film believing it to be real.
Where to from here? Like the boy who cried wolf one time too many I think we are likely to see a rampant spread of cynicism. The true stories will be doubted. The real photos not trusted. Genuine flying saucer photos …. well forget it.
Good bye Age of Aquarius, hello Age of Disbelief.
And amidst all this, I read last week that our police forensic department (or whatever their official name is) is going digital with their cameras.
It surprised me they hadn’t already but then thought, wouldn’t it be smarter to stick with old-fashioned film?
The simple fact is, there aren’t that many great non-digital retouchers around anymore to mess with the original evidence.
So in the words of the late Ali G they could, ‘Keep it real’.
Many years ago the agency, then Knowles Bristow, had the Bundy Rum account. We handled the launch of Bundy into New Zealand. Colour magazine was the main medium. We took a recipe approach showing three ways to mix one’s Bundy – Coke or orange juice or Dry. The photographer set up a rig and simultaneously tipped the mixers into three glasses that already contained rum. Great shot. Transparency of course.
But look out, a member of the NZ parliament had recently read Vance Packard’s, “The Hidden Persuaders”, and on looking at the image through a magnifying glass found the heads of elephants and naked female forms floating in the bubbles retouched in, he concluded, to frighten and/or seduce alcoholics in remission back to the bottle. A parliamentary committee was formed to investigate.
We were able to provide the original tranny as it left the camera which clearly proved that there had been no retouching and that the floating nudes and elephant’s parts, (which were there), had arrived entirely by random accident. We were exonerated.
Be hard to do that with a digital image I guess.