An old joke among journalists reminds them to “never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” Especially, it seems, when you can make them up.
During the ongoing trial by tabloid of Tiger Woods, the most egregious example of this is a computer- generated “news report” of his S.U.V. crash. The video features a robotic simulation of his wife, Elin Nordegren, chasing him with a golf club, Noam Cohen reported in The Times.
The digitally animated piece was created by Next Media, a Hong Kong-based company that owns gossipy newspapers , including Apple Daily. The videos are based on Web and newspaper reports and put together by programmers, designers, animators and actors. These videos represent how the staff thinks events unfolded.
Or not. “That’s a creation,” Ken A. Bode, the viewer representative for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting , told The Times. “How does any Taiwanese journalist know what happened between Tiger Woods and his wife?”
Still, the video, which is in Chinese, has been viewed more than 2.3 million times on YouTube.
Not knowing did not stop Italian prosecutors in the trial of the American college student Amanda Knox from showing a video animation of how they believed her housemate was killed, The Times reported. The cartoon version showed Ms. Knox getting into a fight with her roommate, Meredith Kercher, while her boyfriend held a knife to Ms. Kercher’s neck and another accomplice held her from behind. The animation included grisly photos from Ms.Kercher’s autopsy, perhaps lending an air of authenticity to what was pure speculation. A jury convicted Ms. Knox, 22, and her former Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 25, of murder.
We may be entering an era when the line between video simulation and reality has been blurred to the point where people have trouble distinguishing between the two.
But Daisy Li, the person responsible for scripting the videos for Next Media and who oversaw the Tiger Woods video, gives her viewers more credit than that. “Readers can differentiate that it is an illustration,” she told The Times.
A filmmaker like James Cameron is trying to “dissolve the barrier between human emotion and animation” in making a film like “Avatar,” John Anderson wrote in The Times. The $230 million extravaganza, which employs an advanced digital process known as “performance capture” that translates an actor’s physical movement into a computergenerated image, may or may not revolutionize cinema. Chances are it will sell a lot of tickets, much like Mr. Cameron’s last film, “Titanic.” (“Avatar” opened in 107 countries the weekend of December 18-20 and grossed $232.2 million in sales .)
Gert K. Nielsen, a Danish news graphic consultant, told The Times he was one of the few in the field that viewed the story in a news illustration more important than getting every detail correct.
“If you don’t know if the neighbor’s car is red or black, that shouldn’t stop you from doing a graphic,’’ he said. But with its made-up story and use of “thought balloons’’ to describe what Ms. Nordegren was thinking, he said, “I think that the guys at Apple Daily are too crazy even for my taste.”
TOM BRADY
Animators in Taiwan simulate news events in videos, like this one depicting their version of events surrounding Tiger Woods’s recent accident. / YOUTUBE
