‘You’ve Never Seen Anything Like This on Television!’

		‘You’ve Never Seen Anything Like This on Television!’ CNN’s Election Night Hologram HarryTuttle

For the Presidential election night, on 4 November 2008, CNN decided to show off by declaring they had mastered hologram technology. The speech of the President Elect Obama was held in Chicago, while the ‘CNN election center’ is in New York. The satellite link-up interview of news anchor Wolf Blitzer with correspondent Jessica Yellin was quite a sensation that night. Reality meets fiction – science fiction. They repeated the exploit again a moment later with Obama’s fervent supporter, Will-i-am, who added the clip to the music video of his latest song celebrating the first African-American president in the History of the USA, ‘It’s a New Day´.

It was obviously a joke to amuse an audience faithful to A taste for in-your-face spectacle – like John King’s toy, the Minority Report-inspired giant touch screen. It was more of a bluff than an actual necessity. Especially since they do not seem to know what type of images they are actually dealing with. It is not entirely surprising to see such inclination in the business of Infotainment, the race for the ratings in an escalation of hyperbolic effects. After all, it was only a light moment to kill time in between two properly journalistic newsworthy events. But making such a fuss about special effects, for a ‘reputable’ network like CNN, is telling about their misunderstanding of the integrity of images.

1. Since everything comes to be known via YouTube, we can discover there that this idea of a pseudo-hologram had already been achieved by the BBC in 2006, albeit with still images. But an effort was made to give a perspective deformation to the images to fit them into a high-angle view.

Forgery, misinterpretation and hidden flaws: televisual media stumble in the era of hyper-information. Let us examine the nature of images used on television, their vulgarisation in public discourse and their onscreen perversion. Wolf Blitzer declared: ‘You've never seen anything like this on television!’ (1)

Ceci n’est pas un hologramme

The next morning, after a huge buzz on YouTube, CNN already had to issue a public apology correcting this misnomer, due to numerous complaints in the blogosphere. The principle of holography produces an image that each observer around will perceive from a different perspective according to their relative position. Many angles (if not all) are recorded, embedded in a single holographic object or image. Traditional 2D photography, like video, only records one single point of view, that of the camera. This perspective remains the same when the observers move around the image, whether a poster or a television set. The impression of 3D volume does not exist, even when the camera is on the move. In the case of 3D cinema, the impression of depth is rendered through stereoscopy, but the point of view remains unique: all spectators of an audience will always see the exact same perspective at the same time. CNN's faux-hologram is flat and shows only one point of view. This is not a hologram.

The hoax, explained by hologram expert Jürgen Kreuzer on CBC, is nothing more than the usual green screen well-known by all Hollywood fans. The only technological breakthrough brought in by CNN was to use the famous forecast map effect on live footage with synchronous camera movements, without the two strata of the image appearing disjointed, which would break the impression of concomitant realities.

A making-of segment unveils instantly that the technique used was borrowed from The Matrix (1999): the bullet-time effect. The studio settings are identical, except that the Wachowski brothers only used still cameras while CNN was able to use digital video cameras. In a green room, Jessica Yellin is filmed continuously from all angles simultaneously by an arc of thirty-five cameras. Thus the computers may instantly pick up the right image from the right angle, to correspond to the precise position of the camera currently on air in the New York studio, anywhere along its tracking shot, and to match both live feeds. If you wonder how they can go from a series of videos taken from fixed peepholes in the green screen wall to the gliding of a slow tracking shot, it's all about the smooth interpolation of the video image from adjacent cameras. The computers may create an intermediary image to transition from one angle to the next. The spacing of the cameras and the absence of a background makes the step progression imperceptible. Yellin is only one vertical object with little perspective deformation when the variation of view angle is minimal. If her surrounding had to be also inserted in Blitzer's studio, we could notice more obviously the incremental occultation of the background behind her silhouette as the viewpoint shifts.

In a way, the virtual character exists as a multifaceted hologram inside the computer. This is the initial state of a hologram. But only one side of Yellin is sent at the time to the final broadcast to be pasted in the equally one-dimensional video of Blitzer. So the virtual prowess generated by thirty-five cameras is eventually downgraded to the mundane camerawork of a single cameraman, before going to live TV.

2. In the blurry foreground monitor of a camera seen in the shot, we get a glimpse of the raw footage before superimposition with Blitzer alone, and nothing in front of him.

Blitzer and Anderson Cooper meant to deceive viewers into believing their guests had been teleported holographically, or ‘beamed in’ (as they like to recall the famous line from Star Trek), in order to interact more intimately with an image of this body located hundred miles away. But there was obviously no reconstitution of a holographic object in the studio, and nor was there a real body. (2) The anchor in the studio spoke to himself, just like actors who act with CGI characters on green screens. Remember what the magician said at the Club Silencio in Mulholland Dr. (2001): ‘No hay banda. There is no band. It's all an illusion’. This illusion only works for the spectator watching TV, once the two video feeds have been superimposed by transparency.

Language Trickery

The frontier between real and imaginary becomes confusing when the journalist pretends to see something that only exists on the editing table. Of course, this little white lie is not as worrying as the perversion occurring in the language of images. They may make up a word, and play pretend in order to make the magic trick work smoothly for the audience, without getting into the hassle of explaining every technical issues and thus ruining the game. But two distinct forms of discourse which are incompatible result from this divide between real world and diegesis.

When Bob Hoskins talks to the bunny in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), it is part of his job as an actor to pretend to see the non-existent cartoon rabbit in front of him, since he impersonates a character caught in this peculiar world where humans and cartoons co-exist. When the spectators at a David Cooperfield show ´believe´ that the Statue of Liberty has disappeared before their eyes, they applaud the talent of a prestidigitator whose job is to make the trick invisible in order to awe his audience.

But should we really be awed by journalists becoming comedians as well as prestidigitators? They just broke the news to us right there, so candidly: TV is now capable of manipulating live video content with such mastery that the audience will mistrust anything presented as a filmed document normally put forth as incontestable evidence. It makes one wonder about the invasion of cinematic special effects into our (inter)national news. The nightmarish fantasy from Zelig (1983) or Forrest Gump (1994) – of rewriting history by inserting foreign characters into archival footage of historical scenes – has finally become possible: seamlessly, and live. The era of televisual imposture is just beginning ...

Pay no attention to the blue halo surrounding these pseudo-holograms; it has been added in on the editing table to emphasise the surrealist clash. Paradoxically, the integration of a flaw (fade in, twinkle, horizontal sweep, rough numerical texture, nimbus ... ) renders the illusion more credible to the spectator. A perfect merger would go unnoticed, and the exceptionalness of the event would fall flat.

Virtual Intimacy

The description of what actually happened in the CNN studio also manipulates the language of images. Will this new technology really revolutionise our relation to images? All in all, this pseudo-hologram makes the interview just like any other interview via satellite, watched on a combo monitor or one of those giant plasma screens. The level of reality (or virtuality) is the same: someone is filmed talking to a video image. The situation is thus played out by the two journalists in exactly the same way, whether the guest is displayed on a TV set (seen onscreen, or left offscreen), in an embedded window (in a corner of the spectator's screen), or superimposed within the set of the anchor (through the green screen technique). In any case, the anchor needs to look at the finished image (the two video streams merged in post-production) to know who he is talking to. The intimacy is always simulated. In fact, it makes the work of journalists more difficult. They desperately try to match the eye lines in order to pretend they are looking at someone. Meanwhile, television claims to upgrade our spectator experience ...

See how uncomfortable the guests are in a distance interview via satellite. They are forced to stare into a camera, without seeing whom they are talking to. They are alone in a remote studio, sitting in front of a camera to record a live feed for a show taking place in another city or country. Their body language is completely shackled, because they have nothing to react to; they don't know if and when they are onscreen. They just try to maintain a plain, all-smiling composure. Remember in autumn `08, the ten-way split screen of simultaneous talking heads displayed on the same screen by CNBC to debate the financial crisis? It was certainly an optimal stack of head and shoulder information in spatial terms, but they could only talk one at the time, their idle behaviour is barely significant to their (or our) emotional commitment to the virtual huddle.

This odd phenomenon of a near-perfect imitation of reality, falling short because of an imperceptible flaw, contradicts a total involvement on the part of the spectator. It is called the uncanny valley by robot makers and creators of virtual images, and their terminology resonates with the Freudian notion of the uncanny. Emotional response suddenly becomes negative when the likeness of a pictorial reproduction (or a situation, a behaviour) fails to resemble our own expected mirror reflection. When the illusion is imperfect the spectator agrees to go along, hence the famous ‘suspension of disbelief’ which gives life, in our imagination, to flat animated images on a movie screen. But if Blitzer tells us someone is there in front of him and we can feel somehow the eye lines do not match, our imaginary feels discomforted.

CNN plays safe, because the awkward behaviour of this first experience is largely minimised by wide shots (instead of medium shots) and extremely slow camerawork. The technicians probably wanted to avoid the troubles experienced in the preparatory tests.

Technology of Anomaly

This pricey technology is shamelessly underexploited. Imagine there was another green room built in Arizona in case McCain was the one who won the election. Only the spectacular teleportation into the Manhattan studio of the freshly elected candidate would have justified such a costly apparatus. With the Chicago correspondent, the disproportion between means deployed and results obtained seems quite incredible. Thankfully, this ambitious project was obviously turned down by Obama, if indeed he was ever contacted to take part in this vain media Barnum.

What is the price tag of this in situ documentary imperative? The dispatched correspondent doing her report under the spotlights of a sealed tent next to Obama's podium is as far from the action as Blitzer in front of his screen wall. Much ado about nothing ...

Firstly, as indicated, the shots are poor and the editing is lazy. What kind of intimacy is created when two people each stand still in the corner of a room? Yellin and Blitzer are stiff, petrified by the technical constraints, terrified to spoil the illusion. Yellin is stuck to the red spot on the floor as if prisoner of a beam of light. The slightest step aside, uneasy, floating, gliding on the floor, would kill the magic.

Secondly, look at the original dimension allowed when a person is filmed by thirty-five cameras: they show us the back of this virtual image, in order to conform to banal shot/countershot grammar. Why should a new technology merely recreate what an older technology does? And they make sure they never align the two figures, which could have offered a richer composition, with a foreground overlay. But these images are on two distinct layers. Yellin could not be hidden by Blitzer, but she could be pasted over him. But the soft silhouette of a green screen superimposition is not precise enough to produce a visually satisfying crossing of the two trajectories.

Ghosts and Spectral Apparitions

André Bazin once questioned the nature of transparency used on cinema screens, in an article dating from 1945. His object was the credible representation of supernatural ghosts in movies such as Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941).

3. André Bazin, ‘The Life and Death of Superimposition’ [1945], Film-Philosophy, Vol 6 (2002), <www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/nlbazin.html>.

What in fact appeals to the audience about the fantastic in the cinema is its realism - I mean, the contradiction between the irrefutable objectivity of the photographic image and the unbelievable nature of the events that it depicts. It is not by chance that the first to comprehend the artistic potential of film was Georges Méliès, a magician. [...] If a director does want to employ special effects, he can use devices that are much more sophisticated and elaborate than the tricks handed down to us by Méliès. All he has to do, really, is find a technique that makes a small advance, but an advance that is nonetheless sufficient to render the usual special effects ineffective and therefore unacceptable. [...] If you think about it, such supernatural phenomena are essential to verisimilitude. There is no reason why a ghost should not occupy an exact place in space, nor why it should blend mindlessly into its surroundings. And the reciprocal transparency of superimposition doesn't permit us to say whether the ghost is behind or in front of the objects on which it is superimposed, or whether in fact the objects themselves become spectral to the degree that they share space with the ghost. This defiance of perspective and common sense becomes most annoying once we are aware of it. Superimposition can, in all logic, only suggest the fantastic in a conventional way; it lacks the ability actually to evoke the supernatural. (3)

CNN faces the same issue, albeit reversed. They want the ghostly superimposition to look realistic, despite its virtual and intangible nature.

Mutations of the Virtual

This kind of problem often occurs when cinema tries to appropriate new technologies. The first goal is to restore a familiar reality, instead of exploiting the new possibilities that will invent new situations which were previously impossible in a studio with actors and traditional cameras. For instance, cartoon animators often find inspiration in cinema imagery as recorded by the camera lens, rather than the world of reality that everyone can see with their own eyes. In many animations we can see the literal representation of the flare from a sunbeam bouncing off the lens, which creates a characteristic alignment of hexagons (or disks) corresponding to the number of lenses in the camera apparatus. This effect never happens with the naked eye, so why would a drawing made by hand, or by computers, show it, since there is never a lens involved in the process? The technical anomaly is used as a graphic convention that everybody will understand because they saw it in the movies. But it is not how the real world looks.

In Paprika (2006), Satoshi Kon draws literally, for the oneiric murder scene, a deformed reality as only a camera zoom can see it. The collapse of perspective when a camera zooms in while travelling backward : the famous effect invented by Hitchcock for the stairwell shot in Vertigo (1958). The genius of Hitchcock was to come up with a unique feeling, disturbing our senses, developed within the limitation of the technique at his disposal; a détournement of whatever an optical camera is capable of accomplishing. Whereas everything is possible on a drawing board. Everything has to be added manually from beginning to end. So it is naive for an animator to borrow this form along with its medium-specific technical constraints. The vernacular grammar of film is hereby standardised in order to become a general convention, applied to animation, to which the audience has been conditionned to react. The rotoscoped animations of A Scanner Darkly (2006) and Waltz with Bashir (2008) meticulously trace over the representation that was recorded on camera footage, albeit adding defaults and approximations due to the hurried scan of computers. These anomalies render a cartoon more seductive, more fantastic than the usual video footage from which it derives. Like the blue halo around Jessica Yellin.

4. This technology was borrowed from a team of engineers working for an Israeli sports TV channel, across two tech companies: Vizrt, which works on state-of-the-art virtual studios; and SportVu, a developer of a real-time camera tracking system used in live sporting events.

Thanks to the ingenuity of CNN engineers, (4) we could reinvent the language of images by breaking the interpersonal distance between protagonists. We could imagine the relative notion of a dissociative zoom where green screen elements inserted in a real scenery could be emphasised independently. Instead of a cutaway, a change of axis or a modification of lens multiplier (which affects every element in the image at the same time) it would be possible to modify the respective size and angle of these faux-holograms, the anchor or the interlocutor, to make them rotate automatically or move in and out of centre-stage ...

Recently (10 February 2009) CNN did another report on a new technology for holographic conferencing - again, a hologram wrongly named. But this time there was an effort to project the virtual character onto a glass wall in order to insert it into a real set behind the window (with the audience in front of the window) - although the effect probably works best for the eye-level of seated people. So when you walk around the room the change of perspective might mess up the one-dimensional image streaming on the screen wall. The interaction with a real person who snuck in backstage is not credible for a second. But when virtual characters and the real audience stay on their side of the wall, the imagination is able to fill in the gaps in a satisfying way.

On Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show in June 2007, the giant head of Ted Koppel was displayed on a screen wall instead of being inserted into the anchor's own space. Stewart does not even glance at it, because everyone knows it is a trick. The audience knows, Jon knows, the video recording of Koppel acts as if it knows. Its existence is a joke only supported by the script read by the anchor, while the simulation of the voluntarily underachieved mise en scène discredits it just enough to invite the audience to play along. It is not necessary to act as if all this was real, in the way that CNN did.

Ishii Katsuhito's wonderful The Taste of Tea (2004) also comes to mind: a little girl imagines her giant twin stalking her, and it vanishes every time she turns to look at it. So she observes it from the corner of her eye, and the illusion via her fantasied phobia is given to the audience. This giant döppleganger blends into the environment in a realistic manner, with the right lighting and shading. But the film’s narrative cleverly avoids the direct interaction between the two images, which would clearly show how contact between the two parallel dimensions is impossible.

There is a whole new language of TV images to (re)write, if only TV admitted its artifice and left the pleasure of a willing suspension of disbelief to the audience. Yes, a special effect – what is shown to you is a creative re-enactment of reality that takes full advantage of the rich properties of this virtual avatar. Images are dissociated but meet nonetheless in a unique 3D space reconstructed for the purpose of an improved narrative featuring micro-montage within a continuous take.

And if journalists learn to use it as well as the weathermen with the forecast map to navigate seamlessly in an invisible space, we could eventually reach a certain level of credibility (if not realism) between people living in parallel dimensions and distinct video streams. This sounds cartoonish. But plausibility is in the eye of the beholder: the behaviour of the virtual protagonists themselves toward their environment will help viewers to either believe because they are conscious of the anomaly (like in my above exemples), or doubt it against their allegations that it is simply like any other normal image (which we can easily tell it is not, as in in CNN's hologram simulacra).

The point would be to develop images with mobility and versatility, which is now allowed by the immaterial nature of these so-called holograms. I have no idea where this kind of manipulation of virtual imagery will lead television, nor whether the result will be more interesting, more comfortable, more intuitive, more intimate, more satisfying or more involving than the proverbial ontological realism of the photographic image. But I find the hypocrisy of TV imagery disappointing in its current vain attempt to fabricate an affected immateriality – while calling it, with a straight face, reality.

		© HarryTuttle and Rouge April 2009. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.