Animated Reality

Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly is a masterpiece of drug induced paranoiac writing.

I caught the movie, which is appropriately dark and confusing with some great addict performances from Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder, but it's the style that is the star of this show.

The movie  was filmed digitally and then animated using a technique called interpolated rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is an old school technique - essentially painting over the film cells - that has been updated for the digital age.

And it looks fantastic. In a similar vein to Sin City [and Linklater's earlier Waking Life], the film is confusingly, beautifully, both real and animated.

This is a technique crying out for an ad - all it needs is a proposition - sometimes execution can  back up into strategy: do something that looks like this!

[Suggestions in the comment box please]

This is probably blasphemy to most planners. But why? When they realised they could put a break dancing Gene Kelly into Singing in the Rain, surely directors were scratching their heads looking for a brand to cover the costs, to mutual benefit.

To me this is just another example of technology opening up new opportunities, that requires us to think about how we might be using them - if you don't know it can be done, you can't incorporate into your thinking or build ideas from it.