Revisionist History: Enter the Video

For those who didn't sleep through their history classes about World War II, you may recall hearing about folks "changing history" by altering photographic images. This was before the age of photoshop, so it wasn't just a matter of click and drag and "hey, my sister's head is on a dogs body!" It takes quite a bit of talent, even today, to make convincing alterations to images. Hitler had photos changed, Stalin had photos changed, Mao did it, and (most appalling!) even Ugly Betty does it.

All of this image editing has made it impossible to trust images, more specifically photographs. You really can't be sure that what you're seeing is real, and without a trained eye it's unlikely that you'll even suspect that what you're looking at isn't the real package. Recently, we were fortunate enough to have watchdogs point out that certain published photographs of Iran's nuclear arsenal were... shady.

While photographs became untrustworthy, there remained one true form of image that couldn't be believably faked: motion picture. Sure, there is some impressive CG work, that baby from the stock trade commercial, and movies like 300 have shown us how well we can create visual illusions in film editing, but for the most part we can distinguish real from fake without needing to much expertisé in the field.

Well, Adobe and U of Washington are changing all of that in one very, very cool research project. They're working on technology that can map out parts of a video image and make it editable. Within itself. Meaning (if you watch far enough into it) that you not only track motion of specific objects in the film and do cool things in those motions, but you can capture specific actions in the film and cause them to happen outside of the timeline. You can make a person say something they never said, but make it otherwise appear completely real. It's easily one of the more awesome advances in film editing, and is going to make a huge impact on artwork, design, and our culture. Designers and editors have been faking it for years with photographs, just imagine what they'll do with film! (kinda scary!) Artwork in film has a lot of new potential as well.