collision detection: Flip-book world

November 21, 2004

Flip-book world

Some brilliant Latvian geeks made a sequence of images that, when viewed in stop-action animation, shows a robot-like man walking. They stenciled the images onto various public places, like the telephone box pictured above. Then they took snapshots of all those locations, and assembled them into a brilliant online flip-book: As it zips through all the locations, the man appears to walk. You can pause the movie on any frame to see that individual picture. It's just crazily cool.

Oddly, this reminds me of an idea I had a while ago about Tivo. Advertisers are worried that Tivo users are zipping past TV ads in superfastforward. So why don't they simply embed an advertisment within the normal ad that becomes visible only when you're speeding through the TV spot at high speed? Watch the ad at regular speed, and you see the regular ad; watch it at high speed and you suddenly "see" the secondary ad -- perhaps some sort of animation that works precisely like the one above. Think of it this way: A normal TV ad is 30 seconds long, with 30 frames per second, for a total of 900 frames. I don't know precisely how fast Tivo goes, but let's say you can whip through a normal at in four seconds. That means you only see 117 frames. So what an advertiser should do it create a secondary ad composed of those 117 frames, which pops into existence when you go on fastforward. It would be, of course, maddeningly difficult to create one ad that works in these two modes, but what could possibly be more awesome? Hell, you'd have people frantically watching TV in hopes of seeing it.

(Thanks to Plastic Bag for this one!)

Posted by Clive Thompson at November 21, 2004 03:55 PM

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Comments

Yo, foo. Why do you give this stuff away!?! Damn!

Posted by: George at November 21, 2004 9:40 PM

Ahahahaha!

Posted by: Clive at November 21, 2004 9:45 PM

Goddammit, don't give 'em any ideas.

Posted by: El Rey at November 22, 2004 2:54 AM

Clive,

oh, man, did you really just suggest that video runs at 24 frames per second?
Shame on you, geek! Shame! :)
NTSC video runs at 29.97 frames per second (the ideal being 30 frames per, but they shave it down in -- see http://www.sfu.ca/sca/Manuals/ZAAPf/d/drop_frame.html for an explanation -- to make keep colour video from running long.)
Hopefully, when we're all viewing pure-digital broadcast feeds, they can do away with this, the bane of young film & video production students everywhere...</picayune>

That's an interesting suggestion, embedding the "Clive Thompson TiVO Flip-Book Ad™" into the running ad. However, I bet some psychologists who've done studies on subliminal messaging would take issue: seems to me that the embedded ad would still be "visible" to the unconscious mind in some way...

Posted by: bud at November 22, 2004 7:32 AM

Clive,

Your timing is... so timely. The Intellectual Property Protection Act currently being shoved through Congress includes a provision that will require Tivo to upgrade their software so that users are in fact forced to watch ads while fast forwarding ads.

Please don't have any further nightmares for the next few weeks, as it seems obvious that your dreams are becoming reality ala the "lathe of heaven" syndrome.

Posted by: john t unger at November 22, 2004 9:09 AM

Good idea, but the one thing you can't be certain of when you're creating such an ad would be the frame at which the user began hitting Fast-Forward. If Tivo plays every 30th frame (not sure how its FF works exactly) or so, the viewer would need to hit FF exactly on frame 1 to be able to see an interleaved ad.

Ah, the joys of retrointeractive design.

Posted by: JP at November 22, 2004 10:08 AM

Arg! [slapping forehead] Bud, you are of course correct; in my original entry, I mixed up the frame-rates of regular movie film and video. Movie film is 24 frames per second; video is 30 per second (roughly), which is why movie film looks "warmer" than video. Christ, I atually wrote an entire infostation about this for an exhibit on moviemaking for the American Museum of the Moving Image. Thanks for the catch!

John, yes, I saw that news!

JP, you're right, and that's precisely what I meant in talking about the hellacious difficulty of doing this ad. I don't know how Tivo's technology works, but theoretically you could begin fast-forwarding at any frame, right? If, as I presumed above, you fast-forward through a 30-second ad in 4 seconds, that means you experience 13% of the frames, almost 1 in 8. So you'd have only a 1 in 8 chance of timing things right -- and beginning your fast-forward at the correct point such that you see any of the secret ad at all.

Theoretically, this could make the ad even more desirable -- because not only is it "hidden", but it's hard to view. People would sit there, rewinding and fast-forwarding over and over, until they saw it. Yeah, I know that sounds improbably, but given how crazy the buzz for this ad is, they would.

There's another, even crazier way around it, though. You could simply create 8 different embedded ads, each beginning on a different frame but with the same 1-in-8 periodicity. That would produce an even more spectacular effect: Each time you fast-forwarded, you'd have the chance of seeing something different. And in regular watching speed, the little section of the film with these animations -- I'm envisioning it as a small corner of the screen or something -- would appear just to be a crazy blur of mashed-up images. Presto: An ad that has a mysterious secret in regular mode, but rewards obsessive, repeated viewing.

The first advertiser to create this will have a monster hit, and one of the most memorable ads in TV history.

Posted by: Clive at November 22, 2004 11:00 AM

The only difficulty with the concept is that TiVo doesn't show frames smoothly enough for a flipbook effect. Basically, it's skipping from keyframe to keyframe, and keyframes aren't all that common in highly-compressed MPEG streams. At the highest speed (60X, or one minute per second) you see perhaps six frames from each minute of video, each being held for a tenth of a second.

And there is no reason to skip through commercials at anything but the fastest speed, of course.

Posted by: Jerry Kindall at November 22, 2004 9:11 PM

Good point -- I didn't know that about Tivo's frames!

Posted by: Clive at November 23, 2004 9:18 AM

there was great 'animated' graf series on a subway tunnel wall in brooklyn (can't remember the line) about six to eight years ago. a series of frames were painted along the tunnel. as the train hurtled through the dark tunnel the light from the subway carriage created a flipbook effect animation. inspired genius.

Posted by: james at November 25, 2004 9:23 PM

some of the stuff you think up is scary!

hurry! get it patented!

Posted by: ntexas99 at November 29, 2004 12:01 AM

James, damn, I'd love love love to see that! If you ever figure out where that is, and if it's still up, I would immediately ride over to check it out.

ntexas99, ahahha!

Posted by: Clive at November 29, 2004 6:49 AM

Sir,

this is intriguing!

I have lifted, linked & posted at

http://209.76.108.126/lerevdr/blog/archives/00000113.htm

hope i can contribute

Posted by: Le Rev Dr at December 9, 2004 7:16 PM

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