WHATS WRONG WITH AUTO VIDEOS

Today we're going to take a look at the topic of videos as applied to our favorite subject, cars. Once again, this is a truly amazing area in which the potential for really creative and spectacular things to be done with video regarding cars, their development, their testing, etc., could happen, but just are not right now. I don't know what the problem is, so the things I'm going to suggest in today's post are essentially speculation, but they are probable accurate because these are things that are going on in the industry in general and they affect what is happening with video. Let's take a look at the bright side first.

If you want an example of a video, produced by a manufacturer, of an automobile being driven and tested that is spectacular, check out the Ferrari video for the new Ferrari FF, which will debut in Geneva. What's great about this video? A number of things: First of all, the “Jason Bourne” type graphic introductions to the locales are varied and make the viewer constantly aware of where the car is being driven and able, therefore, to correlate the beautiful locales with the nature of this particular car (the FF, of course, being Ferrari's first four wheel drive project, and a shooting break to boot).

Secondly, the theme music of the video has a movie quality to it. It has a dramatically ascending, well-written score, easily comprehended, with a lot of emotional impact, and yet one that crosses generational spans pretty quickly and pretty convincingly. Finally, there is an emotional peak to the video in that the driving sequences, which take place throughout the world, and with a series of spectacular moments on one of Ferrari's own test tracks, culminating in a video of the car without disguise on these tracks. However, and very cleverly, these last sequences, which feature the car without disguise, edit out the angles of the car which would reveal the new lines of the shooting break, so you essentially don't get the whole package until the car is revealed in Geneva. Really, overall, a brilliant video, and what video about automobiles should aspire to be.

And now, to the rest. In general, car videos, whether they are produced by Web sites that are run by car magazines or produced by the manufacturers themselves, are really pretty bad. Let's deal with the most common car videos, which are those produced by Web sites sponsored by car magazines, such as AutoCar, Car and Driver, Motor Trend, etc., etc., etc. These videos tend to all have some very depressing and glaring weaknesses which I am going to point out very clearly right now. First of all, they usual feature rock and roll soundtracks, which is no bad thing, but the music that they pick was either recorded by the editor's son's 14-year-old garage band, or by someone who had gone deaf a couple of centuries ago. In other words, it's terrible. If they would pick a solid rock and roll soundtrack for these videos, it would be tremendous, and it is an appropriate use of rock and roll, but they are just not picking music that is even palatable.

Number two, the editing. The editing in these videos is beyond bizarre. It's almost as if the videos are edited for an audience entirely made up of viewers with ADHD. It's really incredible. The cutting doesn't allow for really an appreciation of the vehicle and an appreciation of the dynamics of it, either in motion or statically, and this kind of cutting produces a slightly schizophrenic response on the part of the viewer that either leads to (a) nausea and vomiting, or (b) clicking off the site.

Number three, there is no focus on the interior. I don't know how these car magazines produce videos in which they attempt to show or test a car and don't really focus on the interior of the car. Let me ask a question: When you drive a car, among all of the mechanical sensations which are so important to the enjoyment of driving that car, what is the predominant arena you are involved in? That arena, of course, is the interior; the touch, the feel, the sensorium, the technical aspects of the driving experience as related to the controls and the interior, the multimedia experience. All of these experiences are central to the overall driving experience, yet very few videos have ever been produced by any car magazine which spent any amount of time looking at, defining, examining, criticizing, or evaluating the interior of the car. It is truly an amazing oversight, and it produces the same kind of rapid three-minute attention span response in this aspect of our culture as it does in many others. It is truly shameful, and eventually one magazine will get it right, and we will be celebrating them.

Another type of video shoot which needs to get a real spanking today are television shows which attempt to focus on cars as their primary feature. You can see these shows on channels such as Speed TV and other outlets. They tend to be the most idiotic and asinine, pre-teen level television that was ever produced. I thought that I had seen the lowest of the low when watching other programs unrelated to automobiles, but I was so wrong. These shows are absolutely abysmal, and they have the production values of a Russian weather station in Siberia. All of the comments that I made earlier about short videos produced by car magazine Web sites apply to this section, except they are unfortunately expanded to the point of catastrophe. Especially noteworthy in the negative of these shows is the process of editing. These shows will give you quick cuts around a car, so that in the space of seven seconds of video you will have seen the car from 32 angles and had seven quick cuts and seen or experienced essentially nothing. The produces think this is cool. What the producers think is that young minds and young viewers like this kind of rapid fire exposure, and they think that because the current generation is so remarkably media savvy and knows how to maneuver and live in a digital world with great rapidity. That does not mean, however, that they need to be treated as if they are digital farm animals who have no sense of time, space, dimension, perception or emotionality. This is a tragic flaw in these shows, and eventually, again, as I said about the car video sites, somebody is going to make a TV show that really works at this level and we will all be better off for it.

Additionally, in terms of television shows, there is one more comment I need to make about those, and that, of course, is that these programs are scripted by developmentally delayed adults who never finished the third grade. It's unbelievable to hear what these hosts and broadcasters say. Did they really miss high school? I mean, it's just unbelievable. The scripting is illiterate, primitive, and again dumbs down the level of television auto programming and content to a point where it is not even worth discussing.

Finally, the last category for videos, of course, is those that are produced by the manufacturers themselves. These have a very dysthymic quality. Unlike the two categories of videos I have described above, the videos from the manufacturers are usually incredibly mind-bendingly, time-alteringly slow and vapid. It's like being injected with 13 milligrams of diazepam before you watch one. You see the new BMW 5 Series driving through a mountainous region somewhere at a very moderate speed, with a serenely sedated pilot, and the color of the car is gray, and the interior of the car is light gray, and this monotonous crap goes on for 17 minutes, so that you can appreciate the car from every angle until you have fallen asleep. These videos are great, by the way, if you do have a sleep disturbance, and can be used easily for this purpose.

So, there we have the extremes of video as related to automobiles and, hey, I'm sorry to say that it's such a sad state of affairs. I wish that it wasn't this way, and hopefully some hip producers will come along and start to change it. Look, there's somebody out there who knows what they are doing because they produced that video about the Ferrari FF. Just watch that and you will see where we could go if we had quality producers, quality writers, quality cameramen, and quality aesthetics going into this area.