Greetings children, Captain Disillusion here.
Viral marketing is a disgusting sounding, but fascinating thing.
It's complicated, yet laughably predictable.
Whether you're advertising a product or promoting your own web series of crazy stunts with a
quirky name like, I don't know, Tumba Ping Pong Show, getting views is hard.
You slave away producing clever stunt videos for months,
collecting modest hits by modern standards.
And then it hits you. Put a somber blond bird on it
The numbers speak for themselves.
Not to take anything away from the substance of the video,
which features astonishing precision knife throwing and catching using ping pong paddles.
It's an impressive looking stunt that has viewers all over the web scratching their heads,
and bandaging their fingers. It looks dangerous, but is 100% faked.
*glass breaking sound effect*
I will show you exactly how they did it
right... now.
But first let's take a moment to talk about our sponsor:
This week's Captain Disillusion is brought to you by knives.
They cut...
and they don't ask no ***ing questions.
And now back to the show.
Like my uncle used to say,
life would be a lot easier if you could make things invisible, and with visual effects you can!
By cloning pixels of the surrounding area to paint away an object.
But doing it frame by frame in a long video is time-consuming
so you have to be clever and keep those digital invisibility moments to a minimum.
Miss Ping flips her paddles at the moment
they're struck by the knives not for extra flair
but because the knives are in the paddles the whole time.
And it's simpler to erase the smaller knife tips from the plain gray surfaces.
This is the reason for the offbeat choreography.
She begins with the paddles hidden, and incidentally with a ping-pong ball inside her mouth for later.
Then turns quickly, exposing the side view of the paddles
for only a few frames making for less erasing work.
Unfortunately one of the knives grazed her skirt, and that's not so easy to get rid of.
Once she's in position, Mr. Slightly-Mad Max displays some real knives.
He then proceeds to serve them to his paddle, but in reality
he simply pulls them away and lets them quietly drop off screen onto a soft surface such as
a Captain D's Bang Be Gone sound dampening blanket.
Available with free shipping to the alpha quadrant for a limited time.
Watch as these knives defy the laws of physics,
gliding into proper position to be struck.
What you're really seeing is a transition to fake,
composited images of thrown knives, whose carefully keyframed motion-blurred
outlines are only onscreen for a handful of frames to guide your eyes to the other real knives
waiting in Miss Ping's paddles.
Same deal with the ping-pong ball at the very end. Real ball steal,
fake ball pass, real ball mouth reveal.
During the big pineapple finish you don't even see the digitally composited knife land.
You only hear the sound, which they captured separately likely right on location for added authenticity.
*knife landing* *gasps*
But that's not the part we care about. How did the CG knife slice the very obviously real pineapple?
Granted, we only have a highly compressed internet video to work with, but even here,
with a lot of processing, and very little social life, we can spot the oldest trick in the book...
A string.
Confucius was right,
a pre-cut half of a pineapple yanked off by fishing line at just the right moment
can impress two and a half million internet users.
Man, strings. They never get old.
Well, I hope you learned something.
In the world of viral marketing, performing an unbelievable stunt on video will get you far.
Faking one and doing it well will get you further still.
Faking it mediocrely, but with the right distraction, will get you to the top.
But now I'm afraid it's time for me to go kids.
A grade schooler in Illinois can't find her favorite red shoe.
Remember, love with your heart, use your head for everything else.
[Voiceover] Captain Disillusion!
*glass breaking*