I was on Amazon today and they are pushing some short movie project called Amazon Theater.
The first movie, “Do Geese See God” was interesting but the most interesting thing I saw was the credits
Included in the “cast” are all the buyable props in the movie including the shoes the bum was wearing etc. It’s kind of incongruous, first a movie about slowing down and smelling the roses and then oh, yea, buy some merchandise. On the online version the various products are hot linked so if you put your pointer over them as they scroll by the video will pause and you can click to order.
I’ve talked about this before but it’s only going to get worse. HDD recorders and pirated TV via P2P is going to kill TV commercials leading two only a few possibilities. One, no more TV or two, embedding the commericals in the film. Certainly at first there will be the example we have above. I suspect we’ll get to the point where you can pause on any frame of a TV show and either click on the actual props and clothing or pull up a list for that scene to buy all the stuff you see. “click here for Jennifer Aniston’s sweater”.
Its not really surprising. There was a godawful action movie on one of the cable networks that had nothing but Pontiac cars in it. Not surprising since Pontiac paid for it. Thankfully I changed the channell rather then watch a 2 hour Pontiac commercial.
“Do geese see God” is a palindrome. It’s a word or phrase that reads the same in both directions. The homeless man yells out “Was it a rat I saw” and “Dogma, I am God.” “Dr Awkward” is also a palindrome. If you watch the movie again, move your cursor over the rose girl. If you keep the cursor on her, it changes from an arrow to a hand and if you click on her, it changes the video, and if you click on her again, it gives you another ending.
The Tooth Fairy movie is funny.
I would rather have the option to click on something in a TV show then have to sit through the same commercials every couple minutes. The mindless repatition of commercials is my biggest complaint. If they could tastefully embed the commercial in the TV show then I wouldn’t have a problem with it. Now I could see this as a bit of a problem for shows like Star Trek: Enterprise, where none of the props would be purchased except as souveiners to Trek fans. If they started swapping in products from today that would destroy the show.
That reminds me, I just saw I-Robot where near the beginning Will Smith conspicuously shows off his “2004 Converse”