Cr. Ghost in the Shell official fanpage
Ghost in the Shell, a movie based on the popular Japanese Sci-Fi/Cyberpunk manga with the same name that begin released from 1989. A plot that happened in 2029, that talks about the adventure of a cyborg called Major (Motoko Kusanagi originally), who has an actual brain, but the ‘ghost’ (means soul in the movie) were living in a robotic ‘shell’, and the story of how she found her own self’s memories back.
It’s a movie with interesting and epochal settings (particularly when it first issued), set as the near future and discuss about would a robot still being called as a ‘robot’ if they have a brain/soul that could control their self-consciousness. However, today I am not going to have a movie review, or a movie analysis (that’s what cinema studies did and I haven’t enroll it yet). I would like to talk about how this film shows the landscape of our near future, and what kind of media the film crew had imagined for this fantasy future world.
The city was named as Niihama, a fictional one, of course, but starting from its first anime movie at 1995, the city was created by using Hong Kong as a reference (Wikipedia told that… Well, it’s the place where I grew up), and certain places in the movie were also filmed in Hong Kong naturally, here’s a news that indicated the VFX (special effects) before and after comparison of some filmed locations, such as Des Voeux Street and the Cultural Centre.
cr. inverse.com
cr. hecnoutse.cz
cr. Positive Diva
The above images had shown that how Hong Kong would ‘become’ after a few decades, especially the before & after picture, a world where full of nice Holograms and Solograms (solid holograms, a new word created by the movie designer) projections. Except letting me feel quite desirous on the tricks of compose these (yeah, that’s incredible), I was pretty curious on how this means to us when I first seen them (and as a Media student). Real-life projections, an amazing medium to present messages to audiences, and as most of them look huge, I guess their producer were all targeting a wide ranged of viewers (i.e. Pedestrians), including the bit-mapped human face and banners protruded that had been blurred as background, seems intended to gain more crowd’s attention by using these kind of high-technology media.
Referring to this making-of video, besides static media (e.g. Posters and printed banners) had been upgraded to Solograpics, dynamic media such as video billboards and TV monitors had also mostly been replaced with those new-aged products. A few hypothetical questions had popped into my head: Would we ‘traditional media’ operators could still being existed in this holography oriented world, or we have to follow, to adapt to this trend in order to survive? If these imaginations had all come true, could these advertising media really being that attractive to our next generation, or just a temporary trend like the 3D TV or the VR (?) technology? Let’s make a guess then~