Macs A Key Part Of Controversial Anti-Bush Ads (some mac users all tingly about socialism)

"I think the message we tried to deliver is something we really believed in. We were passionate in our beliefs and everyone has a right in our democracy to do that."

Mr. Stowell was part of a team that produced one of 26 political commercials in a recent online contest soliciting political ads critical of President Bush. Entitled the 'Bush in 30 seconds' TV ad contest and sponsored by the Washington, DC-based public policy advocacy group MoveOn.org, Stowell's spot - entitled "Pop Quiz" - was produced and edited on a Mac.

In fact, the majority of the finalist spots were produced using Macs. From medium to large design studios and often someone's home basement, the commercials came from a variety of people who had an idea, a passion to speak their mind and often a Mac on their desktop.

"Here was the first time I ever saw this kind of idea of people using the freedom that comes from technology for a political purpose to speak their minds," said Mr. Stowell, founder of the New York City graphic design studio, Open.

Co-produced with colleagues Susan Barber, Cara Brower and Kate Kittredge, the spot quickly asks the viewer to answer rapid fire questions on a variety of political issues and attributes the answers to various news sources. In every instance, the critical answer is "George W. Bush." The spot ends with the question, "What's wrong with this picture?"

All of the spot are similar to "Pop Quiz" in that they criticize the president on a variety of fronts, from the controversial war in Iraq to the national debt and even educational funding.

The spot voted best overall, entitled "Child's Pay," made news headlines in late January after the CBS television network decided not to broadcast it during last Sunday's Super Bowl XXXVIII because of its long-standing policy not to air advocacy ads. Instead, the spot ran during the half-time of the NFL championship game, but on CNN, rather than on CBS's Super Bowl broadcast itself. The 30-second, dialogue-free spot featured children working as janitors, dishwashers and garbage collectors and ended with the caption, "Guess who's going to pay off President Bush's $1 trillion deficit?"

For many of the ad's producers, a Mac was the platform of choice that often made the difference between tedious editing over dozens of hours or days and producing a spot sometimes in just one afternoon.

Mr. Stowell and his team used a 1.25 MHz dual processor Power Mac G4 to produce "Pop Quiz," together with Adobe Illustrator to do the graphics and After Effects for the animation. One of the reasons Stowell and his team used simple type for their spot was to not only be different from the majority of other spots, but because they had decided to enter the competition very close to the deadline. "After we came up with the concept, we cranked it out in no time and the Mac made a big difference."

The runner-up for best overall ad was also produced on a Mac. Entitled "What Are We Teaching Our Children?", Fred Surr together with Ted Page and Janet Tashjian of Needham, Mass., produced a tongue in cheek spot that hit home their message.

The ad features six young kids, each delivering a speech to adults on what they would do if they were elected president - from, "If elected, I'll lie about weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to invade another country," to "I'll leave no child behind, unless they can't afford it."

Mr. Surr, an independent producer and founder of the production company Captains of Industry, used a Media 100 editing system on a Power Mac 9600 to edit the spot in no more than "six to eight hours."

A Mac user since 1988, Mr. Surr was just as passionate about his Macs as he was about his political spot. "I don't like Windows, honestly. I think it's a kludge format and always has been."

Because all of the talent and production workers donated their time, Mr. Surr was able to produce the spot for less than US$100 after renting one single item - a professional microphone. "Everyone donated their time," he said. "We had six kids, about 10 adults together with extras and four others at the shoot."

Reaction to the spot has been overwhelmingly positive, according to Mr. Surr. "Even friends and colleagues that are Republicans look at the spot chuckling and say, 'Well, you can't argue with the premise.' "

Most of the spots were inexpensive to make, except for one produced on film by Adam Feinstein, an independent film maker from New York City. Entitled "Polygraph," the spot was shot on Super 16mm film and then transferred using the Telecine process of converting a film negative to video tape. It was then edited on a 533MHz-dual processor Power Mac G4 with Final Cut Pro.

About US$1,000 to shoot and produce, Mr. Feinstein turned to some 30 friends to donate money toward the cost of making the commercial. "I'm a filmmaker who has had my political soul stirred to life in the last three years," Mr. Feinstein told The Mac Observer. "If I can credit Mr. Bush with anything, it's making me realize how important it is for me as a media maker to say and do something that can make a difference."

The spot shows an actual polygraph machine registering responses to comments made by President Bush during his State of the Union speech in January of 2003. As Mr. Bush utters certain facts, the polygraph is shown violently moving, as if to convince the viewer that his comments are all lies.

But it was the parody piece "Desktop" that hits closest to home for Mac users, regardless of their political beliefs.

David Haynes is a filmmaker, writer and director making independent films under his small production company Tanglewood Films in Dallas, Texas. Having entered the competition later than most, Mr. Haynes had little time to devise a concept, shoot it and edit it.

For him, the star of his spot was his Mac. Mr. Haynes used his Sony VX-2000 digital camera to shoot his OS 9 desktop. "I sort of brainstormed the idea of using the Mac and having the file folders represent different components of our government and different programs that have happened over the last few years that in my opinion were not so great," he said.

The spot shows a desktop pointer moving folders marked 'Social Security, 'Environment', 'Civil Liberties' and more over the seal of the president to the Trash. Only after a message warns that the folders will be permanently deleted and a bloated trash icon erases the folders does the spot end with the words, "What's next?"

"I've never really been a political person and followed politics," Mr. Haynes responded when asked what was the catalyst for him to produce the political spot. "There was a point during the build up to the Iraq war that the Bush Administration seemed to want to go to war really, really badly. Something about that raised a red flag in my head and it didn't seem very American and didn't feel right."

Mr. Haynes used an 867 MHz Power Mac G4 with Final Cut Pro to edit his 30-second spot, which took about a day to shoot and produce.

All the producers were convinced their Macs made a difference in being able to focus on making the best ad, instead of worrying about the technical aspects.

"My Mac allowed me to focus on the message," said Mr. Surr. "I just find it to be really, really dependable. There's not a lot of surprises on a Mac. It doesn't crash on me and it's just a solid work station."

"If you subtracted all the Macs in my life, I would be paralyzed," said Mr. Feinstein. "Every project I haven't edited on film, I've edited on a Mac."

When Mr. Stowell was asked why his studio only uses Mac, his response was short and sweet. "Why? I can't think of any reason why not."

At times like these I like to refer back to "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson.

Apple has always insisted on having a hardware monopoly, except for a brief period in the mid-1990s when they allowed clone-makers to compete with them, before subsequently putting them out of business. Macintosh hardware was, consequently, expensive. You didn't open it up and fool around with it because doing so would void the warranty. In fact the first Mac was specifically designed to be difficult to open--you needed a kit of exotic tools, which you could buy through little ads that began to appear in the back pages of magazines a few months after the Mac came out on the market. These ads always had a certain disreputable air about them, like pitches for lock-picking tools in the backs of lurid detective magazines.
This monopolistic policy can be explained in at least three different ways.
THE CHARITABLE EXPLANATION is that the hardware monopoly policy reflected a drive on Apple's part to provide a seamless, unified blending of hardware, operating system, and software. There is something to this. It is hard enough to make an OS that works well on one specific piece of hardware, designed and tested by engineers who work down the hallway from you, in the same company. Making an OS to work on arbitrary pieces of hardware, cranked out by rabidly entrepeneurial clonemakers on the other side of the International Date Line, is very difficult, and accounts for much of the troubles people have using Windows.
THE FINANCIAL EXPLANATION is that Apple, unlike Microsoft, is and always has been a hardware company. It simply depends on revenue from selling hardware, and cannot exist without it.
THE NOT-SO-CHARITABLE EXPLANATION has to do with Apple's corporate culture, which is rooted in Bay Area Baby Boomdom.
Now, since I'm going to talk for a moment about culture, full disclosure is probably in order, to protect myself against allegations of conflict of interest and ethical turpitude: (1) Geographically I am a Seattleite, of a Saturnine temperament, and inclined to take a sour view of the Dionysian Bay Area, just as they tend to be annoyed and appalled by us. (2) Chronologically I am a post-Baby Boomer. I feel that way, at least, because I never experienced the fun and exciting parts of the whole Boomer scene--just spent a lot of time dutifully chuckling at Boomers' maddeningly pointless anecdotes about just how stoned they got on various occasions, and politely fielding their assertions about how great their music was. But even from this remove it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways.
Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an exercise for the reader, and not a very difficult exercise.
It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?
It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them.
It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with reality. (The answer, for people who don't like Damoclean questions, is that since Microsoft has won the hearts and minds of the silent majority--the bourgeoisie--they don't give a damn about having a slick image, any more then Dick Nixon did.
"I want to believe,"--the mantra that Fox Mulder has pinned to his office wall in The X-Files--applies in different ways to these two companies; Mac partisans want to believe in the image of Apple purveyed in those ads, and in the notion that Macs are somehow fundamentally different from other computers, while Windows people want to believe that they are getting something for their money, engaging in a respectable business transaction).
...
But the price that we Mac owners had to pay for superior aesthetics and engineering was not merely a financial one. There was a cultural price too, stemming from the fact that we couldn't open up the hood and mess around with it. Doug Barnes was right. Apple, in spite of its reputation as the machine of choice of scruffy, creative hacker types, had actually created a machine that discouraged hacking, while Microsoft, viewed as a technological laggard and copycat, had created a vast, disorderly parts bazaar--a primordial soup that eventually self-assembled into Linux.

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