Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Silent Hill Meets Popular Media Wet Dream

I loved the news item I saw on Sky TV tonight. It seems that they had recently flighted a documentary on British TV outlining how Gaddafi had provided arms and support to the IRA. Nothing like a little funding for the IRA to get all the Brits up in arms.

The problem of course is that somebody in the public domain noticed after the documentary was flighted, that part of the footage in the doccie was from a video game. What? A video game? What was more revealing was that the mealie-mouthed explanation was that the video game footage was "accidentally included".

Let me get this right. Help me to understand this : the video editorial staff are sitting in a studio working with video tape (probably more like digital disc footage) and stills pictures and audio, and they are busily grafting and editing and suddenly (ta ra!!!!),a random XBox lying on the floor surreptitiously gets up and plugs itself in and deposits a section of vid game footage onto the final production edit without any of the team being aware of it. Nobody notices that the final edit is some seconds longer than before. Nobody sits up and says "Oy Mate - that looks like Silent Hill I was playing a few hours ago - what's it doing on the tape?" It just "accidentally" finds its way past all of the eagle-eyed video mastering staff, and onto the tape.

Excuse me - who in the current audience has the words "dumb shit" written on their foreheads in flashing neon? Well I think maybe many - otherwise they wouldn't have resorted to such a stupid explanation. We're all so dumbed-down these days. We believe anything. The tooth fairy exists. The cheque is in the mail. Pull the other one - it's got bells on.

I wonder if they would have found their accidental gremlin if somebody hadn't noticed the game footage? Ah! Clever game graphics these days - you never know where it will crop up next - or where it will be used and for which purpose.

"The camera doesn't lie"  - an old saying, prior to the days of digital editing and the wizardry that exists these days. All the more reason to stay awake and stop believing everything you see on TV. Who knows? Next thing they'll be trying to tell us the Americans have killed Bin Laden - 9 years after he already died.

Can't wait for the next release of Silent Hill - never know where we can use it.

2 comments:

  1. http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/09/29/corporate-media-caught-video-game-footage-evidence-links-gaddafi-terrorists-72391/comment-page-1/#comment-740301

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