Raw Footage Quotes

To us, reality is just raw footage: Unclear. Desultory. Too shocking or not quite shocking enough. It’s ironic that making something more real involves making it less real, but Gideon always says people don’t want real. They want the idea of real, which involves production.

Get used to the idea of significant portion of the population walking around with high-speed Internet connections on their person, with sophisticated video cameras built in. They will be shooting all kinds of events all the time. Crime. Crashes. Speeches. Sports. And the footage won't be the short, sanitized and safe versions we usually see on television, courtesy of the old media gatekeepers. The user-generated pictures and video will be raw and real. It will be disturbing, yet illuminating. And it will be shared over the 'Net almost as it happens, and available for everyone to see.

Then, just as we were to leave on a whirlwind honeymoon in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, a call came from Australia. Steve’s friend John Stainton had word that a big croc had been frequenting areas too close to civilization, and someone had been taking potshots at him. “It’s a big one, Stevo, maybe fourteen or fifteen feet,” John said over the phone. “I hate to catch you right at this moment, but they’re going to kill him unless he gets relocated.” John was one of Australia’s award-winning documentary filmmakers. He and Steve had met in the late 1980s, when Steve would help John shoot commercials that required a zoo animal like a lizard or a turtle. But their friendship did not really take off until 1990, when an Australian beer company hired John to film a tricky shot involving a crocodile. He called Steve. “They want a bloke to toss a coldie to another bloke, but a croc comes out of the water and snatches at it. The guy grabs the beer right in front of the croc’s jaws. You think that’s doable?” “Sure, mate, no problem at all,” Steve said with his usual confidence. “Only one thing, it has to be my hand in front of the croc.” John agreed. He journeyed up to the zoo to film the commercial. It was the first time he had seen Steve on his own turf, and he was impressed. He was even more impressed when the croc shoot went off flawlessly. Monty, the saltwater crocodile, lay partially submerged in his pool. An actor fetched a coldie from the esky and tossed it toward Steve. As Steve’s hand went above Monty’s head, the crocodile lunged upward in a food response. On film it looked like the croc was about to snatch the can--which Steve caught right in front of his jaws. John was extremely impressed. As he left the zoo after completing the commercial shoot, Steve gave him a collection of VHS tapes. Steve had shot the videotapes himself. The raw footage came from Steve simply propping his camera in a tree, or jamming it into the mud, and filming himself single-handedly catching crocs. John watched the tapes when he got home to Brisbane. He told me later that what he saw was unbelievable. “It was three hours of captivating film and I watched it straight through, twice,” John recalled to me. “It was Steve. The camera loved him.” He rang up his contacts in television and explained that he had a hot property. The programmers couldn’t use Steve’s original VHS footage, but one of them had a better idea. He gave John the green light to shoot his own documentary of Steve. That led to John Stainton’s call to Oregon on the eve of our honeymoon. “I know it’s not the best timing, mate,” John said, “but we could take a crew and film a documentary of you rescuing this crocodile.” Steve turned to me. Honeymoon or crocodile? For him, it wasn’t much of a quandary. But what about me?” “Let’s go,” I replied.

When one is screening raw footage of people in costume tripping on mushrooms and dancing sloppily to a reggae band, a little goes a long way,

The reason why we can’t see our eyes moving with our own eyes is because our brains edit out the bits between the saccades—a process called saccadic suppression. Without it, we’d look at an object and it would be a blurry mess. What we perceive as vision is the director’s cut of a film, with your brain as the director, seamlessly stitching together the raw footage to make a coherent reality. Perception is the brain’s best guess at what the world actually looks like. Immense though the computing power of that fleshy mass sitting in the darkness of our skulls is, if we were to take in all the information in front of our eyes, our brains would surely explode.** Instead, our eyes sample bits and pieces of the world, and we fill in the blanks in our heads. This fact is fundamental to the way that cinema works. A film is typically 24 static images run together every second, which our brain sees as continuous fluid movement—that’s why it’s called a movie. The illusion of movement actually happens at more like 16 frames per second. At that speed, a film projection is indistinguishable from the real world, at least to us. It was the introduction of sound that set the standard of 24 frames per second with The Jazz Singer in 1927, the first film to have synchronized dialogue. The company

attacked in the darkness by unknown assailants, directly leading to Punk pinning Rock; the announcers blamed the Shield for the attack. The match was later restarted with Rock winning. The next day on Raw, the Shield attacked and laid out John Cena; Sheamus and Ryback suffered the same fate when they attempted to save Cena. Later in the show, it was revealed through footage played by Vince McMahon that Punk and/or his manager Paul Heyman had been paying the Shield and Brad Maddox to work for them all along. This set up a six-man tag team match at Elimination Chamber, which the Shield won. At WrestleMania 29, The Shield made victims of Randy Orton, Sheamus & Big Show in what was The Show of Shows debut of "The Hounds of Justice." The following night on Raw, The Shield attempted to attack The Undertaker but were stopped by Team Hell No. This set up a six-man tag team match on the April 22 episode of Raw, where The Shield emerged victorious. Four days later on SmackDown, Ambrose made his singles debut against Undertaker but lost via submission, after which the Shield attacked Undertaker and triple-powerbombed him through the announcer's table. On the May 3 episode of SmackDown, Ambrose defeated Kane in a singles match. On May 19 at Extreme Rules, Ambrose defeated Kofi Kingston to win the WWE United States Championship, his first singles title in WWE, while Rollins and Reigns won the WWE Tag Team Championships later that night. Ambrose made his first televised title defense on the following episode of SmackDown, retaining his title when he was disqualified due to the rest of the Shield's interference. Three days later on Raw, Ambrose defeated Kingston again to retain his title. At WWE Payback, Ambrose defeated Kane via

Thus the movie would be a mixture of Hannaford’s smooth, elegantly filmed picture and the raw, quick-cut, cinema verité footage from the birthday party.

Micah purred, unaware of the camera mere feet away, “I saw the footage of you in the Comitium lobby. You gave your Archesian amulet to Sandriel. And she destroyed it.” His broad hand clamped around her neck, and Bryce squeezed her eyes shut. “That’s how I realized. How you realized the truth, too.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bryce whispered. Micah’s hand tightened, and it might as well have been his hand on Hunt’s throat for all the difficulty he had breathing. “For three years, you wore that amulet. Every single day, every single hour. Danika knew that. Knew you were without ambition, too, and would never have the drive to leave this job. And thus never take off the amulet.” “You’re insane,” Bryce managed to say. “Am I? Then explain to me why, within an hour after you took off the amulet, that kristallos demon attacked you.” Hunt stilled. A demon had attacked her that day? He found Ruhn’s stare, and the prince nodded, his face deathly pale. We got to her in time was all Danaan said to him, mind-to-mind. “Bad luck?” Bryce tried. Micah didn’t so much as smile, his hand still clamped on her neck. “You don’t just have the Horn. You are the Horn.” His hand again ran down her back. “You became its bearer the night Danika had it ground into a fine powder, mixed it with witch-ink, and then got you so drunk you didn’t ask questions when she had it tattooed onto your back.” “What?” Fury Axtar barked. Holy fucking gods. Hunt bared his teeth, still forbidden from speaking. But Bryce said, “Cool as that sounds, Governor, this tattoo says—” “The language is beyond that of this world. It is the language of universes. And it spells out a direct command to activate the Horn through a blast of raw power upon the tattoo itself. Just as it once did for the Starborn Prince. You may not possess his gifts like your brother, but I believe your bloodline and the synth shall compensate for it when I use my power upon you. To fill the tattoo—to fill you—with power is, in essence, to blow the Horn.

Still, these are very much exceptions. AI video analysis could quantify this, but if you took the top N most popular movies and TV shows over the past several decades, in terms of raw hours of footage watched, I’d bet the world has seen a >1000:1 ratio of scenes featuring evil capitalists to scenes featuring evil communists.

One piece of AI, called the generator, is instructed to create a deepfake showing, for example, Hillary Clinton endorsing Ron DeSantis. The generator is provided with sufficient raw data, including video footage and voice recordings of Clinton. It then uses the data to create an initial video. That video is passed to a different piece of AI, called the discriminator. The discriminator’s job is to sniff out counterfeits. When it looks at the generator’s first draft of the video, it can tell it’s a fake. So, the discriminator passes it back to the generator and basically says, “Fake news!” The generator looks at what tipped the discriminator off that the video was counterfeit, makes some changes to address those issues, and then sends it back to the discriminator for another evaluation. It fails the “sniff test” again, and the clip goes back to the generator for a third iteration. Rinse and repeat a million times or more. Finally, maybe on version 1,438,847, the discriminator looks at the video and says, in effect, “Holy cow! Hillary Clinton endorsed Ron DeSantis!