Meta-Time Lapses: Faking History for a Good Cause

The actress in Fund B92: One photo a day in the worst year of my life. Image Source: Best Ads on TV.

The blog is back from a break! I'm still facing work demands, so this blog will feature new posts on Mondays only until those demands clear. This blog has profiled the work of Noah Kalina (here and here), one of the original Millennial film-makers to take a photo of himself every day over a long period of time and turn it into a compressed flip-book video. The technique was also explored in the pre-Internet Age. Lately, the time-lapse-on-Youtube meme has become a meta-meme, where the time lapse the film-maker depicts isn't a real history, but a staged one.

In an earlier post on a time lapse video created by Ben Blennerhassett, the lines between history and metahistory began to blur. What happens to the higher integrity of reality when technological interpretations dominate how we think? Manipulated depictions of reality become subject to the conventions of fiction:

If we turn our lives into videos and self-marketing film sequences, will these works become subject to the tropes of cinematic narratives? Will these Millennial documentaries of the Self be viewed with the same expectations that we bring to watching movies?

We are on the edge of not minding that distinction between history and cinema. Will faked accounts of reality become more important or more credible than reality?

B92's staged domestic abuse still. Image Source: De Wereld Morgen.

A good example came in the faking of history for a good cause. In March 2013, a time lapse video entitled One photo a day in the worst year of my life went viral. Created in Belgrade by B92 and Saatchi & Saatchi, it depicts a woman who has been repeatedly assaulted by her boyfriend. Viewers believed the video was real and it went viral. But the video was faked; it was a guerilla marketing campaign to promote awareness of domestic violence. Fund B92's video description and credits confirm the intentions behind this believable, yet fake, meta-history:

Confronted by alarming statistics on domestic violence in Serbia we created PSA to shake public out of lethargy and put this issue into focus of society. Idea: Use YouTube’s popular format in which a person takes one photo every day, but with a twist. Result: In less than a week, video hit 3 million views and entered top 5 most popular videos on YouTube. It generated tens of thousands of comments and extensive global media coverage.

Advertising Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, Belgrade, Serbia

Executive Creative Director: Veljko Golubovic

Creative Director: Zarko Veljkovic

Associate Creative Director: Dragana Petkovic

Managing Director: Sonja Milovic

Account Manager: Zorica Marjanovic

Agency Producer: Ivan Zornic

Designer: Ana Cvetkovic

Planner: Tatjana Milnovic

Published: March 2013

See the video below the jump.

Video Source: Youtube.