Your computer can change reality!

Shocking confession: 'I want my CEO to dance with Ginger Rogers!'

I have a confession to make. I am a professional corporate journalist and my favorite publication is The Weekly World News.

I don't just skim it when I'm in the supermarket lineup, either. I buy it every week.

Reading the News on the train home from work unclogs my brain. After a long week of grinding out a company newsletter, thumbing through a fresh copy of America's wackiest tabloid is like stepping into a cool shower on a hot day.

I like the snappy, outrageous leads and the supertight circus-style layout. And I love looking at what the zany gang down in Lantana, Fla. have done with the photos. For instance, this week on the front page is a dramatic shot of the crumpled wreckage of a UFO with two Russian soldiers, who had just shot the alien vessel down, in the background. Inside is a great picture of Leona Helmsley pumping iron in prison with a body that would rival Jane Fonda's.

Technical advances bend reality

It's amazing what you can do with a Macintosh and a scanner these days. Retouching a photo -- a task once reserved for obscure, highly paid specialists armed with airbrushes and magnifying glasses -- can now be done by anyone who can click a mouse.

The Weekly World News isn't the only print medium where retouched photos are showing up. The most recent public controversy is whether Demi Moore's body-painted hips were electronically narrowed for her Vanity Fair cover. And even the said National Geographic got caught in the act about 10 years ago for using retouching techniques to change the position of two ancient Egyptian pyramids in a cover photo.

In the last few years, the traditional sanctity of the photographic image has been pretty much destroyed by the encroachment of digital image manipulation. It started in the mid 1980s with a move away from traditional darkroom fussing and hand retouching to the use of sophisticated and expensive electronic equipment operated by technicians at large printing and pre-press trade shops. Over the last three years, the technology has crept into design houses and DTP service bureaus, and now, finally, it is in the hands of newsletter editors with a taste for cheap tabloids.

True confessions

Just the other week I had a photo taken for my newsletter that was a horizontal shot. At deadline time it had to fit into a vertical space. I took the digital image, which had been created on a Cdn. $2,000 desktop scanner, and opened it up in Adobe Photoshop, a popular retouching software application. In no time, I moved the two people in the photo about an inch and a half closer together. Presto! The picture fit, the newsletter was published, and the change was completely undetectable.

Was my meddling with reality a simple technical act -- or a breach of professional ethics? You won't find out on the next Oprah Winfrey TV show, but I think in the next couple of years our industry is going to be talking about the issue of what constitutes unethical manipulation of images.

Sheri Rosen, ABC, independent communication consultant of Mandeville, La. and resident IABC techno-guru, agrees that changes in technology are opening up a debate about truth vs. fiction in photography.

"On one end, photos in advertising have been doctored, touched up and manipulated for years," says Rosen. "On the other, you've got the journalistic idea of a photo capturing an event. As business communicators, we fall somewhere in between."

Rosen says new desktop technology creates an extension to the traditional role of the writer/editor who gathers the facts and chooses which ones to publish. Just as we choose our words to make our message clear, we now have the power to make editorial changes to an image just as easily. But she says having that power does not necessarily mean that we should make a habit of using it.

"My inclination is to not do a lot of retouching," she says. "It may come to the point where, on our mastheads, we say 'images in this publication have not been manipulated.'"

The case of the slippery CEO

You won't find that kind of claim on most corporate annual reports, which have always lived in the grey area between art and journalism. No one in our business would question the ethics of digitally eliminating a zit from the chairman's chin, or altering a photo to stop an errant tree branch from interfering with the reader's view of the company logo. The problem is that, with today's high-end technology, we now are capable of making the chairman look taller and thinner, and we can use a photo taken of him wearing a thong bathing suit at a resort in France, digitally clip him out of the frame, and put him in coveralls standing on the shop floor of the factory. No one would ever know that he doesn't like to get the soles of his brogues dirty.

"There's nothing new in the concept of retouching," says Lou Williams, ABC, APR, of L.C. Williams and Associates in Chicago. "All we're getting is new ways to do it. If it gets abused, we can't blame the technology. We can only blame ourselves. I maintain that you can do these things as long as it doesn't change the truth. If you have any sense of integrity at all, you can make those decisions. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be in this business."

Indeed. Maybe we should be looking at digital retouching technology as an important new tool that allows us to create better and more powerful images to enhance our communication.

Lies, sex and videotape

Nowhere is the ability to use pictures to communicate messages more potent than in the world of video. And anybody who watches television these days knows that digital image manipulation is used today on most major national television advertising. Last year's model car magically "morphs" into this year's. A bottle of beer 50 stories high is ascended by a team of sexy models. We're becoming used to reality changed before our eyes.

Perhaps the most striking example of what can be done is in the recent series of Diet Coke commercials combining archival movie footage with current pop music stars. In the first one, Elton John sits at a piano with Louis Armstrong standing behind him. In the latest, Paula Abdul dances a duet with a young Gene Kelly.

This kind of stuff has been done before; a couple of years ago Hank Williams Jr. used digital image manipulation to allow himself to sing a video duet with his late father. And putting people in different backgrounds using the "chromeakey" technique has been done in television for decades. The difference in the Coke commercials is that the effect is completely seamless.

Another difference is that to create the striking half-minute footage, it took 1,700 person-hours crammed into six weeks of day-and-night work in a huge studio in mid-town Manhattan.

"It's funny that you should mention the Diet Coke commercials," says Jennifer Padden, who works on company videos in the human resources communication department of the Bank of America in San Francisco. "As soon as I saw the Paula Abdul/Gene Kelly commercial, I went to my production people and said, 'I want to have our CEO dancing with Ginger Rogers!'"

Padden won a Gold Quill award of merit for her first video project, a safety training piece for Bank of America employees. Since then she has done about 10 videos for her company on issues ranging from performance management to coping with stress. She says she welcomes any kind of advance in technology that would allow her to make her videos more interesting to her viewers.

On the Gold-Quill-winning video, a voice was distorted in a comic way to emphasize an important message. And in a recent training video, the narrator was shot against a blue background as she walked around the studio set. Later, animated images were placed around the host to illustrate key messages.

Most corporate video experts would die to have the kind of resources available to Padden. Because Bank of America has an employee base of 88,000 people, she has the luxury of being able to work with an in-house team of video specialists and use current post-production techniques.

With all that's possible, does she ever worry about crossing the line between fact and fabricated reality?

"We don't fool employees," says Padden. "I wouldn't put an image in front of them that distorted the truth. By using special effects, you're not lying to people, you're just making it easier to understand. Often we'll come out with a theme or gimmick to illustrate our videos using humor. There's no question that it isn't real."

The question today, I suppose, is not whether an image is real, but whether it is true. The Weekly World News doesn't pretend to be true, and the New York Times would never doctor a news photograph. Business communicators have always had the power to rearrange reality to make a point. Today, more than ever, we need to be careful how we use that power, and keep our own inner cameras focused sharply on the truth.

Ron Shewchuck is editor, communication projects, Petro-Canada, Calgary, Alta.