Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Sep. 26 2007, 19:38 |
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Quote (Matt @ Sep. 26 2007, 20:42) | Maybe all of the recent cases (in the UK at least) of audiences being duped by fake or misleadingly edited footage has made me oversensitive. The video clearly tries to portray a blissful Lang Lang playing MOTS as though he thought it was a beautiful piece. Is that in fact what he thought or just clever (misleading) advertising by careful video editing. Just because it is inevitable these days that they would do this doesn't make it right. |
All that's happened recently is that a few boundaries have been overstepped and things have gone a bit too far. I can say as someone who works fairly regularly in television that it in no way portrays reality - it portrays what the programme makers feel the viewers will accept as reality. I would say almost for certain that you'll find that at least half of those shots were of the musicians playing different parts of the piece to what they appear to be playing. It doesn't matter...it fits with the music and the suggestion that they're playing what you're hearing is believable. The very fact that it's been edited makes it highly biased - there were probably loads of moments when the musicians were sat around doing nothing, perhaps a few conversations between a few of them about how they didn't like the music and wished they were recording another Mozart album, no doubt the odd disagreement in the control room and all sorts of other things which they don't show. The director has gone in there and told the story which Universal wants to be told. It's a promotional video commissioned by marketing men, not the absolute truth. It may not make it right, but absolutely every piece of film or video you see has a degree of this going on.
I could give an example of something I put together fairly recently. It was all shot by myself and so using only one camera. Some of the sequences were of things which were repeated several times, so I shot from a different angle each time then edited those together so it appeared as if they were all part of the same take, just seen from different angles. My finished sequences did not show the absolute truth, but they were more interesting than a single take shot from one place. A great deal of films and music videos are shot in the same way. It's not showing the absolute truth, but it creates an end product which still adheres to the director's vision of how the event portrayed should be seen. That's all you ever get - what one person (or perhaps a few people) thinks is right; perhaps you'll even know how it is, if you've been to an event with friends and they start telling people afterwards about what happened, and you step in to say "No, it wasn't like that at all...". Then comes the argument where it turns out that each of you have seen things rather differently. That's the basic problem of any kind of journalism - even the people who think they are telling the truth aren't giving the whole picture. Of course that's a bit different to 'creative' editing of footage but really in this case...it's a promo video, and I think considering that Lang Lang played on the album, editing a promo of Lang Lang into a promo for Music of the Spheres isn't a huge crime.
Regarding how Lang Lang looks...I can guarantee that if he'd been there and had looked like he'd not been enjoying it, they'd have asked him to do another take and told him to look more blissful (or they'd have picked out a few bits of a long take where he looked blissful even if he hadn't looked that for most of it). Videos and films are like that. Watch them, enjoy them, take them for what they are and be critical of them. Watching them, even if unedited, is no way the same as being there...and being there is not the same as being someone else and being there (not that it's possible...yet ).
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