No Need To Fake It

I don't know what it says about me when the good, well-produced commercials never seem to stick in my brain, yet the ones which look as they they were done in one take with a home video camera are forever burned into my memory. For example, because I watch a lot of the Golf Channel I keep seeing this commercial for a particular brand of putter. While that in and of itself isn't special because every third commercial on that channel is for a club, what makes this one stick out is the ending. Towards the end you see a ball trickle to the hole and disappear, as you would expect with any putter commercial. What makes this one different from the other putter commercials is that the ball is clearly CGI'd in and the work is terrible. (In an ironic twist, this is also one of those national commercials which clearly took the cheaper option for how often it is run and therefore can be dropped for a local ad. You can tell when this happens because the local ad is never long enough and after it ends the channel cuts back and you still see the last couple of seconds of the national ad. In this case all you see is the crappy CGI'd golf ball. I guess that is why they say you should always make sure your last impression is a good one.) Naturally, because this commercial is so bad, I love it.

Now, if you ever take the time to browse through my movie library, you will quickly be able to tell that I don't hold anything against movies which rely heavily on Computer Graphic Imaging because they make up the majority of the collection. But with that being said, I'm just not sure this was the place to break out the big computer special effects. After all, the shot was fairly straightforward: it was just a ball rolling 8-10 feet and then disappearing into a cup. Wouldn't that seem like the kind of shot you could get without much effort? Sure, you may need a few takes, but I still don't think it would take much in the way of resetting. Just get the old golf ball out of the frame and try again. Even if the green was really tricky I think it would be more advisable to mess with the putting surface. Gently pressing down and creating a rut that leads to the hole would essentially do the same thing without being noticeable unless you were standing over the putt. All this particular effect has done is make me question how good the product is, because if they couldn't even make one putt in the commercial with all the time in the world, what chance would I have on an actual green?

This probably speaks to the larger issue of quality graphics programs becoming too available for too many people. My father was saying this the other day - it is getting harder and harder to tell if anything you see in an ad is real anymore. On the commercials with really high-production value and the budget to hire the best people, it is damn near impossible to tell if the perfectly normal thing you are seeing is real or fake. (At this point "MythBusters" could probably do a season on nothing but the things people see in ads.) I think the car commercials are the worst, because with those you can never tell if it was done with fancy driving skills on a closed course or some guy behind a desk in a darkened studio. I'm not saying CGI doesn't come in handy. I'm sure it is much more cost-effective to use a graphics program which makes it look like there are 30 cars doing a stunt the same stunt at the same time versus actually hiring 30 stunt drivers and a film crew, then spending the day trying to get the right light and hoping no one wrecks the $70,000 automobile on the first take. But when you can't tell if something as simple as a car pulling into a driveway is real or the product of a computer, that could be a sign things have gotten out of control.

It just makes me worry that we're all getting too lazy. It is one thing to use technology to get a shot because the real thing is impossible, it is entirely another to use it when the real thing is easy to accomplish, but people just don't want to put in any effort. Not to mention, it takes focus away from what it really important - I don't need a car which can go backwards down a windy mountain road, I need one which will start every time I turn the key for the first 8-10 years I own it, hopefully gets good gas mileage and doesn't mysteriously turn itself off at 70 mph. (Tells you all you need to know about my vehicle history.) Excessive CGI, whether it be in a movie or a commercial, just leads me to believe the producers are trying to hide how bad the product behind the special effects really is. Face it - there is a reason you never see flashy commercials for things like ice cream. Those guys know they have a great product and there is no need to distract people from that fact with a big production. Honestly, I think the day I see an ice cream commercial and the spoon has been CGI'd in will be the day I stop watching television.