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Comment by evaneykelen | Hacker News Reader

Can a cinematographer explain to me why the Apple logo (or even the whole laptop) doesn't stay centered but shifts a few pixels now and then?

Would the clip look too polished (not real) if the logo remained at exactly the same position for the duration of the clip?

There must be a 'movie-technical' reason for this because it deviates from an otherwise pixel-perfect Apple ad.

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I've done work in animation and I see this intentional imprecision as referencing back to analog stop motion techniques. Of course today they could manipulate the individual stills to perfectly align with each other and make the whole spot look more slick, but the point of the ad is to emphasize the manual individualization of their products by customers. You can see scratches and wear on a few of the laptops. The subtle shifting increases as the ad comes to its climax adding more motion to an otherwise still plane which, to me, cements the idea that this is intentional.

As a videomaker, I was a little stunned by how 'imperfect' it was, for a few of the shots.

It has to be a conscious artistic decision, because it would be trivial to 'nudge' the frame around in an NLE (we'll assume Final Cut here, right?) to make sure the Apple logo never moved.

There are also some shadow inconsistencies that could've been skipped, there's no need to actually swap out the entire laptop for each shot, could just use the logo/sticker area.

I agree with the other commenters, but sort of wonder if they missed the mark by going "half way" gritty/raw/stop-motion. The Gondry example is a perfect one, because he doesn't make each shot 99% close to the one before it. If you're going to make it imperfect, really make it imperfect. It'll look better if it doesn't look like a mistake.

I think it is a great example of wabi-sabi. [0]

Also, as other commenters have pointed out, it gives the ad an organic, hand-made feel. It is something that you could put together at home with some nice lighting, a camera, and iMovie.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

The technique is called stop frame animation and inherently has a bit of camera/object jitter. Apple could have eliminated this but it is more authentic to keep the retro-styling and hand made vibe together with the theme of the creativity. For a great stop frame animation example check out Gondry's music video for the white stripes made with legohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTH71AAxXmM

They wanted to make it organic and more stop-motion like.

Plus, only people with OCD would both notice AND care about any small pixel jumps.

Stop motion chic perhaps?

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