Phillips' Parallel Lines, originally a 5-film series from RSA Films released this last April to promote a television, is in the middle of another line of online film. This go-round is the "Tell It Your Way" competition where 3-minute works from filmmakers all around the world keep the same 6-line script about a unicorn.

No stranger to a challenge, Keegan Wilcox took the reigns. He has worked in the entertainment industry in varying capacities for over six years after graduating from the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts in 2005. He is now owner/operator of his own commercial production company called 100to1 Productions, which has been in business for three years.

From the over 600 entries, Wilcox's film "Porcelain Unicorn" is currently in the top ten.

Of all the contests to enter, why this one?

Keegan Wilcox Truth be told, I dislike competitions. I think they're the antithesis of what allows a good film to be made. They eliminate a filmmaker's most valuable asset: time. However, when I found out this one was engineered by Ridley Scott, I couldn't resist. I'm a huge fan of his and would love nothing more than for him to acknowledge our work.

Which of the five original films from RSA inspired you the most and why?

KW That's a tough question. Much like this competition, all five films had their own significant qualities. I admired "The Gift" for its technical ingenuity and visual craftsmanship. I admired "El Secreto de Mateo" the most for its powerful story and brilliant take on dialogue. I would probably be the most indecisive judge in a competition.

You're usually producing commercials but here you wrote and directed. What was your process for creating your entry, "Porcelain Unicorn?"

KW Well, I've dipped into the directing pot before on several commercials, more recently in the last two years. Really, I've been doing this since I was about 14, so it's engrained in my psyche. For me, the most important part of the process — and also the hardest part — is finding a good story worth communicating. That's where I really focus my efforts, because once we have that, it's simply about how to pull it off. My business partner and I spent a full week developing ideas, throwing most of them in the trash, and then spent another week writing three of our top choices. We sent our scripts out to friends and colleagues whose valuable input helped us decide which one to produce. A week-and-a-half of pre-production, two shoot days and ten post-production days later, our film was ready to submit… one hour before the deadline.

Usually contests like this are juried. But via YouTube, this one asks anyone (signed into YouTube.com or not) to vote for the best ten before they officially see the eyes of director Sir Ridley Scott. What are the challenges you face with marketing your contest entry?

KW The biggest challenge for us has been strategy. No one really has had a simple answer on how to maximize online exposure, especially with a film like ours. It quickly becomes labeled as just another "Holocaust or World War II short film." There's a billion out there and most of them suck, so why watch another one? Forget that when people see it, they love it — first we need them to know it exists. So part of our "strategy" has been asking people with large online followings to promote our film and encourage their followers to vote. We've reached out to dozens of blogs, radio stations and newspapers, but it's difficult to monitor those results, because the competition runners keep the tally hidden until September 6^th.

You're working with limiting your time production and post with strict deadlines, balancing a fixed script with your wild imagination, reaching a potentially wide exposure (albeit online), and maybe making a buck or two. Do you think this the future of short films?

KW If this was the future of short films, I think it would have happened already. The short film medium will always be there to fulfill a multitude of needs, whether that be advertising, online or artistic self-promotion. Competitions are just another exhibition where fledgling filmmakers can strut their stuff, as they have always been.

You need to vote by this Sunday, September 5^th for you to get to the next round. How can readers help and what happens next?

KW Yes, the clock is ticking! If you want to see an excellent three-minute short film, you can visit our website at porcelainunicorn.com, and click on the link to vote. You can also check out the competition website directly at youtube.com/philipscinema, where you'll find the top ten contestants listed under "Gallery." The five films with the most public votes move on to the third and final round, where the winner will be selected by Sir Ridley Scott himself. We have until 3pm on Sunday to accumulate the most votes! I believe we're only one of two US entries.

Photo by Axel Bührmann. (Used under Creative Commons license.)

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to spend some testing time with a collection of Canon 5Ds and 7Ds that belong to one of my clients. I learned a couple of thing that others may find useful.

1. Formatting cards

   The format of the cards is different in the 5D and 7D. Each of the cameras will read and write to a card formatted on the other model but it appears to be ill-advised. The differences slow down the write performance on either camera, the 7D in particular. The write performance, as evidenced by the "busy" bar on the display, definitely improves if the card is formatted directly on the camera it is intended for. We discovered this as were were switching cameras for lens testing and wanted to keep the files on the same card.

   On a related note, just deleting files on a PC or Mac is also a bad ideal. Files on the flash media do not appear to actually get deleted, rather they are marked as deleted in the directory and the clusters can be reused. This causes old style file fragmentation on the card and appears to degrade write performance.

2. Card speed and type

   The cards we were using on the shoot were fast but they were not UDMA cards. UDMA cards, in addition to being simply faster, also perform some of the disk io operations directly on the card. The standard cards do not do this so the CPU in the camera has to this work. This can increase the risk of overheating and in the worst case stall the camera. We tested outside in the bright sun and were able to repeatedly overheat cameras with non UDMA cards that performed fine when a UDMA card was substituted. This is particularly important on the 5D. It was also very evident when running in 60p for slo-mo on the 7D.

   The performance difference also shows up in still frame motor drive mode. In the 5D we got 3 frames per second with the slow cards and 3.9 with the UDMA cards. On the 7D we got 6.5 frames per second on the old cards and the full rated 8 frames per second with the UDMA cards.

   So, buy UDMA cards for video and save non UDMA cards for audio recording or low frame rate still photo use.

Great work from Adrien Merigeau, Old Fangs is an animated short about three forest-friends going on a coming-of-age journey so one can confront the father he hasn’t seen since he was a child.

The film was an Official Selection in the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. It may be cute, but the story is adult and full of heartache and loss.

(Originally published on Space Pod Betty.)

Branded content is reaching new industries, ones where the client wants video to reach an audience with ease and a budget that needs to last for a while. Here, it's a luxury hotel, high-end chocolate maker, kitchen appliance company, and lingerie boutique that are embracing quality, creative video content for the web.

Parker Palm Springs

Instead of showcasing their rooms or pools as-is, each video from Parker Palm Springs — used throughout their website — has a perspective and plays out like a vignette from a feature film. On the "Play" area of the site, the video follows a man who plays a losing game of tennis catches the eye of a woman. She lures him through the property to share a lemonade. Another — for the Gene Autry suite — watches a masked man enter a room of other masked couples and, en route through the suite and its kitchen, finds a single masked woman who takes his hand.

The campaign's creative was done in-house, with the film production hired out. The videos are only available on the website, although they're hosted privately on Vimeo.

Mast Brothers Chocolate

The Scout produced a short documentary about this New York-based chocolate company. Although the film is missing from their official site, the work by director Brennan Stasiewicz and DP Ed David plays like a well-told company overview.

The video is part of a series for the magazine, reminiscent of Pentagram video by Hillman Curtis, who is one of the forerunners in making short films for the web.

AEG | Electrolux

The design studio Department of the 4^th Dimension (DDDD), helmed by one of the filmmakers who authored the visions in Spielberg's "Minority Report" (see our past post, "Building Relationships with Online Audiences"), recently followed up to their Intelligentsia coffee profiles. For AEG | Electrolux, specifically with chef Jack O'Shea as a series on the Perfunkt.com portal, DDDD shot a handful of videos showcasing the culinary artisan going through his process. Check out how O'Shea selects his meat or the overview teaser below:

Agent Provocateur

No stranger to a web video strategy, where one intimate ad wrangled 45 million hits over three years, Agent Provocateur teamed with director Johan Renck and producer RSA for the "Private Tapes" campaign, which launched this month. The press release describes the 25-second videos as a "seductively voyeuristic experience, though the viewer is in no doubt that the woman is empowered and entirely in control of the recording." The home-video look highlights the parallels to the rise in point-of-view experiences brought on by webcams, cell phones, and consumer cameras. See all the "Private Tapes" or below for "Gangster Slip," one of the ads:

Mustafa, my man! You and your pecs are all over all my pixel-producing products.

You and your client, Old Spice, and your agency buddies at Wieden + Kennedy have grasped the online golden ring–created yet another in a long and continuing line of viral videos full of sound and fury that signifies…not nothing, of course, since we’re all talking about it. And for six months every other goddamn product sold to men is going to be accompanied by a magnificently muscled, superbly scented half-naked black man (subtlety is not a hallmark of digital communications) viral video component.

And naturally, given the ingenious nature of the ploy–Mustafa and Wieden holed up in the great Northwest mass-producing custom videos for people–squeals of a marketing revolution echo throughout the blogosphere.

Nothing makes me happier than to see you kids get all tingly about something you think breaks the rules. Except this doesn’t.

The Old Spice campaign is clever, no doubt about it. Well executed. (It’s Wieden, after all.) And tonally spot on (sardonic, ironic and solipsistic, just what the digital doctor ordered). But new?

Um, no.

Here’s the good news and the bad news about the digital ecosystem: you can do more things than you used to in marketing communications, and you have more options every day (the good). But there are such things as communications truisms, and if you don’t have those locked in at the strategic level, no amount of tactical wizardry is going to result in success (the bad).

Don’t let the pixilated pixie dust blind you. The Old Spice campaign is successful–as an awareness and brand-building tool–not because it uses viral videos and interacts with users. Those are just newish tools.

It is successful–as an awareness and brand-building tool–because it is a by-the-book multimedia promotion that honors communications basics in both concept and activation. Take on the ancient marketplace ventures we called sweepstakes and contests.

The proof, as always, is in the profit. You do remember sales, right? The bottom line? The actual reason any company does this stuff? Ad Age ran a story today that found the Old Spice viral effort bumped the sales needle only a tiny bit. But its competitors also saw sales rise in the same period. Why? Not because of any viral video but because all of them recently offered…really good coupons.

Oops. There goes the revolution.

Still, by all means, linger lovingly over that manly chest. Fire up the webcam and post your own dumbass version (you know you want to). Just remember one thing about Old Spice’s viral victory: it was old-school strategy, not new-world wizardry, that made this campaign fly.

In Lars von Trier’s excellent documentary The Five Obstructions (2003), von Trier challenges his mentor and veteran filmmaker Jorgen Leth to remake Leth's own highly-regarded short film, "The Perfect Human" (1967), five different times. Acting as a creative trickster, von Trier requires that Leth be subject to a different set of substantial limitations on each of the five remakes. Two themes relevant to the lives of creative professionals are explored within this setup: creativity through limitation and the mentor/mentee relationship.

1. Creativity Through Limitation

How many times does a filmmaker wish he or she had unlimited funds and complete creative freedom? In The Five Obstructions, the student attempts to trip up the teacher by doing the opposite: limiting the creator’s freedom. Without judging him negatively, Von Trier deems Leth to be detached and overly affected as an artist. Von Trier jokes with Leth, but his obstructions are meant to go to Leth’s heart—to rattle him. Leth plays along, but, at first, he is somewhat lethargic. One guesses before von Trier mentions it that Leth is going through a creative stagnation. The first challenge appears daunting to an older filmmaker like Leth (particularly the maximum of 12-frames-per-shot rule), but it is really a softball to get Leth warmed up. Next, von Trier directs Leth to shoot a remake in close proximity to real human suffering, and then, perhaps more challenging, in the next remake, given no limitations at all. As the challenges go on, one can see Leth start to enjoy the process. In fact, the fiercer von Trier’s obstructions, the more Leth is engaged.

What is demonstrated is that conscious (in the sense that the limitations are from Leth’s friend and devotee) limitation firmly imposed can inspire. This begs the question: How can creative fire be found in limitation that seems arbitrary, such as a client’s unrealistic demand or unforeseen inclement weather? This may be overly metaphysical for this blogspace, but perhaps investigation into what one considers to be the nature of conscious action could be a direction for exploration.

2. The Mentor/Mentee Relationship

Professionals in the entertainment industry often benefit greatly from formal and informal mentor/mentee relationships. In these liaisons, there is the sense that the master must be firmly in control at all times. Annakin Skywalker is chastised for challenging his masters, and it is a short, slippery Mustafarian slope from there to the dark side. Von Trier turns this dynamic on its head in The Five Obstructions. Here master willingly and (mostly) eagerly allows the apprentice to challenge him. Sensing Leth’s funk, von Trier leads and prods Leth in the first two remakes. Leth regains his feet in the third remake (where he is given absolute freedom) and then knocks it out of the park in the fourth remake. By the fifth remake, von Trier is ready to admit that his obstructions and efforts were actually thwarted (obstructed) by the mastery of Leth. Von Trier relinquishes the mantle he temporarily possessed and declares that Leth has earned its return.

What von Trier and Leth explore is the dance of the mentor/mentee relationship. The push and pull; the yin and yang. The master usually will lead simply through his or her superior skill, and great deference must be given to the master during the moments when his or her control cannot be maintained. However, the apprentice must also be willing to take initiative, to push back (for example, the classic movie beat in which the black belt asks the adept to throw a punch and the adept, no matter how tough, usually ends up on his back), to challenge the master, to know the master, and to give energy to the master when he or she has slipped. At the same time, the master must be willing to accept the challenge and not seek, so to speak, to eat the young in response to their natural impudence.

For the limitations of each obstruction see Wikipedia. For a short movie review, visit AllMovie.

Note the next FWD:labs Salon is next Saturday, July 24^th. It will include an exploration of what near-unlimited funds and near-complete creative freedom looks like.

"Touching Stories" is a four-film experiment in short interactive filmmaking for the iPad, which got attention at this year's Cannes Lions festival. Tool of North America had five directors working in collaboration with Domani Studios to make the project, now available on iTunes.

One of the shorts is shot in first-person. "You get to dial a pay phone, retrieve keys from a woman lounging in a pool, even shake the iPad back and forth as you're running in order to put some serious distance between you and your would-be attackers," notes the review in Fast Company magazine. "[The iPad] brings storytelling to a completely new level because you're completely in control of the experience," adds director Jason Zada, who co-wrote "All Ends, Ends All" with writer Tim Immordino:

How did you get involved with "Touching Stories?"

Tim Immordino Jason Zada (co-director of "All Ends, Ends All" with Erich Joiner) and I have been collaborating on various projects for a couple of years now. He asked me to come in and write with him, and bring my particular spice to the concept.

What's it like to collaborate again with director Jason Zada?

TI It's great. We've worked on several things since We All Float On, our web series, and at this point there's a level of comfort, understanding, and brutal honesty that serves us well. Of course, he's a visionary when it comes to new media, he's a huge mentor to me in this space.

With co-writing "All Ends, Ends All," what's different structurally? How do you go about writing for interactive, "choose your own adventure" stories?

TI Storytelling is storytelling, you need a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it needs to be character-driven, etc. Obviously we couldn't have a million choices for each action, so basically, there's one correct answer which beings you to the next event / part of the story, but in taking the other paths (for example, when you dial numbers on the pay phone trying to find the right one) the world this character is living in becomes more fleshed out. You hear other characters and learn bits of their stories, its suggested he's in a complete and seamless world. That said, the one thing you want to make sure of is that these false solutions pay off in some way, they don't last forever and squander the beat. Its still a film, after all, so we can't hang out between beats forever. In other words, it may take three or four calls to get the right answer in the example above, but the story arc is the same, and all those false solutions serve the story.

What were some of the challenges to overcome in terms of leading the user's navigation and the usefulness itself of the interactivity?

TI There were all the usual challenges of production — we were losing light, etc, — but when you're shooting video for interactive, things also have to read in a way that the user is drawn to interact with them. Its easy enough to give hints on the screen, lead people along, but the ideal is to find elegant ways of doing things which feel organic for the user. Jason is a master at this, and the iPad itself helped a lot with its large, visual interface.

In terms of its usefulness, interactivity works really well to tell some stories, not as well with others. You can make an experience richer, but its also easy to just get in the way and have roadblocks to the audience's immersion, which in theory is the exact opposite of why we use interactivity in the first place. The litmus test, in my opinion, is somewhat similar to what we ask ourselves when writing for traditional media. That is, does what we're doing enrich the experience, help us to be engaged, suspend disbelief (i.e. does it serve the story)?

The allure of the alternate ending. Especially with the inclusion of hints and easter eggs, this gives new meaning to watching again. How did repeat viewing factor into the writing process?

TI That's a good question. Jason actually had the very cool idea of not changing the ending, but instead allowing the user to switch perspectives near the end, and on the fly. As the tension mounts, suddenly the user is allowed to see both sides, from the POV of both the hunter and the hunted. When you take a minute to think about how in the traditional narratives, strong storytelling usually involves building some degree of empathy for the antagonist as well as the protagonist, allowing the viewer's actual POV to straddle that line can be very compelling.

With interactive content, what's the one thing that everyone should do?

TI User experience is so important. I think taking it into account when thinking about the beats, how this thing will play out with timing, tension, etc is key. There are not a lot of hard and fast rules, but UX is one of the things that should guide you.

The iPad is one of the latest distribution platforms for film. With the iPhone and its GPS, we had location-sensing experiments like GPS Film. Regardless of platform, what interactive stories in the past do you admire and why?

TI Off the top of my head, in the traditional (if we could call it that) stories told in the interactive space one of the coolest things I've seen in the last couple of years was a site called Hotel 626. It was produced by interactive producer extraordinaire Maggie O'Brien, who also worked for Jason at EVB back in the day. I thought it really delivered on its promise of immersion, it sucked the user in and there were surprises around every corner. Of course we could also talk about video games like Red Dead Redemption, etc.

What has me excited now is the possibility of mixing interactive storytelling with real-world interaction, somewhat like the link you share above. There have been a lot of web 2.0 stunts like the Livestrong Chalkbot, and Amazing Race-type things, but I'm particularly excited right now about the possibility of creating fictional narratives which live alongside us in the real world.

Where do you think interactive cinema is headed?

TI I have no idea. Maybe more non-linear storytelling, or allowing the audience to live within a film or show, explore that world in real (film) time as the story moves forward around them, play with time, replaying events from different points of view, etc. I think there are a lot of different directions it will go in. Or maybe "movies" will live in our reality, and vice versa, per my last answer. It's obviously still in its infancy, but I'm excited about the possibilities.

–

Related, Fast Company also posted a making-of video for the series:

Today, the book "Ancestor" by Scott Sigler is available in stores from Crown Publishing. But that's not enough. This author, a New York Times best-seller and pioneer of the podcast novel, is always on his toes for reaching new audiences, regardless of what publicity his publisher garners.

Pre-sales and first-week sales add to his count for climbing up the NYT best-seller charts, where moving up one rung to the next means quite a lot. The "Ancestor" blitz began months ago by building up anticipation. It's finally available in hardback — after being a free podcast, mind you — but people have been talking and tweeting about this book for months.

One of several buzz generators that Sigler figured out with other books was the "Ancestor" book trailer, which I directed and FWD:labs produced. As publicist Areille Ford wrote in the article "Why Make a Book Trailer? Do They Work?," a book trailer is "designed to get the buzz going." Here is some of the feedback that the trailer received, amid all the buzz about the book itself:

• io9: "Book trailers are always a bit like low-budget short films, but this trailer for Scott Sigler's bio-horror film Ancestor relishes its exploitation movie cred. It's flesh-rippingly awesome, and more than enough to get you primed for mad-science nastiness."
• The Creative Penn: "Scott has also created an awesome book trailer that is just like a movie trailer. Trailers are a great way to get attention from readers but also can be a way to attract a movie deal itself. Visual culture and YouTube is so ingrained in culture that a book trailer can convert people who might not go to bookstores into buyers. Trailers are also ‘evergreen’ marketing and get views daily. This is so much better than print advertising so it is worth spending time and effort on."
• David Moody: "There are book trailers and there are book trailers. This is a bloody excellent book trailer."
• Noël Tanti: "I admit I have never heard of Scott Sigler, however this trailer for Ancestor, his latest book, is awesome."
• Dread Central: "On June 22^nd best selling author Scott Sigler's new novel Ancestor hits store shelves from Crown Publishing, and to show off the cinematic, horror movie quality of the book, he's created a trailer with blood, guns, guys, girls, and monsters! What more could you ask for?"
• Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff: "I’ve seen book trailers before but this one is ridiculous! It looks like a movie already."

Related, this is another growing opportunity for writers and screenwriters to work with sound and images to find new audiences online. Video can boost interest and draw attention for a literary or movie agent, if not a deal itself.

Director: Aaron Proctor
Writer: Scott Sigler
PJ Colding: Matt Hish
Software Magnate: Francis Dominic Olivieri
Dante: Montgomery Paulsen
Magnus: Jacob Holman
Galina: Dana Buchanan
Sara: Whitney Ullom
Sven: Nolan Mecham
Producer: P. James Keitel
Director of Photography: Aaron Proctor
CGI / Visual Effects: Kevin Capizzi
Editor: Jamie Surgener
Casting: Ashley George
Costume Design: Dana Buchanan
Make-up: A Kovacs
Make-up Effects: Ron Karkoska (Monster Effects)
Sound: Mike Weinstein
Prop Master: Dana Buchanan
Assistant Camera: Jackie Sutton
Gaffer: Jeff Stewart
Key Grip: Sean Griffith
Grip: Nick Kane
Music: "Prayers" by In This Moment (courtesy of Century Media)
Production Company: FWD:labs

When "Unthinkable," a new film by Gregor Jordan which stars Samuel L. Jackson and Carrie-Anne Moss, became available online — for free and in pristine quality — it wasn't intentional. The film based on a comic by Mark Sable and Julian Totino Tedesco was bootlegged, only officially coming out Tuesday from Sony Home Video. The film's producer, Cotty Chubb, spoke with Patrick Goldstein at the Los Angeles Times about the vibrant discussion and reviews on IMDb's message boards of the film that's not supposed to be out yet:

"It's tremendous to go on IMDB and see that our user rating is 7.3, which is the highest rating of any movies in the current Top 10 there — you have to go down to 'Iron Man 2' to find a higher rating. But on the other hand, while everyone is debating all these important moral questions, I want to ask them another important question — hey, guys, what about the morality of watching this movie on the Internet for free?"

…

Meanwhile, Chubb has engaged the people who've been buzzing about the movie by steering the discussion to a vital economic issue, or at least a vital one for anyone who thinks there has to be a new economic model for film releases. Here's a condensed version of what he wrote on the IMDB message board:

"I've heard a lot of reasons why streaming or downloading movies is a good idea, why everyone concerned should be happy with the attention (and in fact I am grateful for it), and how it's the new real world, but I haven't heard how the folks that paid for the picture are supposed to make their money back. So here's one question, expressed a couple of different ways: Is there a fair price, fair in YOUR eyes, that you would pay for a download? 'Hey, take a chance, it's only a buck?' 'People tell me it's great, I'll drop two bucks?' 'Here's three bucks, I can afford it and it's only fair?' What number seems right to you? 'Or is it zero, screw it I don't care?' "

The responses have been fascinating, though I suspect they might also be profoundly disturbing to studio executives bent on protecting the windows model of releasing a film first in theaters and then on home video, all long before copies are available for downloading. Some viewers said they use downloading as a screening process to determine which movies they are willing to buy. Others suggested that studios embrace an iTunes model, with movies costing $2 or $3 to download. But everyone wanted the movies right away, not long after their theatrical release. And hardly anyone had any qualms about watching a pirated copy of the movie on the Web. It was certainly hard to find any enthusiastic supporters of the DVD model, since many consumers resent having to sit through the endless piracy warnings and trailer-ads that crowd the front of every new DVD.

While a similar situation happened with the Marvel Comics film "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," which was leaked online prior to its May 2009 theatrical release, only independent films like "Children of Invention" have made strong headway by distributing concurrently with theater screenings.

One thing is certain: it's great practice to build relationships with online audiences, like Chubb joining the message boards on IMDb, even if it's not all sunshine and roses.

The New York Times just printed a gushing (one might even say jingoistic) report on how the military is using new technology to tap into Generation Y’s social networking skills to nail insurgents and protect American troops, all from thousands of miles away. Read the Times’ account, and you’d think this is mostly an exciting technology, which earnest, freckle-faced youths can use to scrub bad guys while they befriend their tougher colleagues on the ground, via chat rooms.

But as even that article acknowledges, the technology sometimes goes awry, like the time in February when Predator drones in Afghanistan snuffed out the lives of 23 innocent men, women and children — just one of many such incidents.

Well, here’s another perspective on what it means to turn the enemy (or those assumed to be) into pixelated blobs: Wikileaks’ video of a U.S. helicopter annihilating as many as 12 people in 2007 on a Baghdad street, including two Reuters journalists.

I’m not embedding the video on this site because it makes me feel physically sick to watch it, and there’s really no commentary I can give that will add to its value. You will note, however, how much the clip looks like a short segment of Grand Theft Auto. Right down to the dialogue: After the first round of shooting is finished, a voice says, “Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards” and another begs a dying man to pick up a weapon, implying that he’d then have a license to kill.

In some sense, this is just a raw dispatch from war. I’ve never been in a war, and I can only assume that its dialogue has been and always will be full of the most unpleasant things imaginable.

There is a particular coldness to this killing, though, and I think the technology has something to do with it. I hardly think we should celebrate it. The military says that rules of engagement were followed. If that is true, that is an indictment of the technology.

To see a sanitized version of the Wikileaks video, take a look at this BBC report on the detention of a US military analyst, possibly for leaking the tape.

I’m not a gamer, so I wasn’t aware just how similar video games are to the video from Wikileaks. If you had the stomach to watch that clip (beware, it’s extremely violent and disturbing), you will probably be shocked to see just how similar the game Call of Duty is to the actual experience:

My point here is not so much to slam video games, but to suggest there is something remarkable — and awful — about this convergence of technologies. Entertainment, since its earliest forms, has always used war as inspiration. But until now it has been impossible to have a simulated experience that is so nearly exactly like the real one.

And it’s not that entertainment has chased war as much as some experiences of war — the remote ones — are becoming more like entertainment. Part of the appeal of entertainment that shows killing is that it removes all the nastier aspects of the experience — from the humanity of an enemy to the feeling of immediate vulnerability. Old west gunfights were probably nothing like those in High Plains Drifter. Saving Private Ryan might be uncomfortably real, but it certainly can’t be a substitute for participating in D-Day. The similarity between coördinating drone strikes, though, and playing Call of Duty seems unprecedented.

Does this influence how we as a country decide which wars to wage? It’s hard to say for sure, but there are certainly some interesting parallels between our foreign policy and the experience the technology helps create: god-like feelings of omnipotence, invulnerability, superiority, cold detachment from others’ suffering.

It is awe-inspiring technology, but it is also dangerous — not just for journalists carrying video cameras around the streets of Baghdad, but, I think, for the people pulling the trigger (or pushing the buttons). Or maybe I just think that way because my parents read me Lord of the Rings when I was 10.

(Originally published on The Long Gone Daddy.)