Stock footage can be an important artistic tool. From its use as the calming background to Joe Pera’s musings or fodder for unnerving Adult Swim shorts to its ability to stand in for the celebrity actors and lavish effects of Hollywood movies, stock art is capable of being used for more than just a good way to find photos of unremarkable people doing ridiculous shit.
Consider, for example, how well it can be used in giving us a low rent, live-action Simpsons intro sequence.
The video was made by stock art maestro Matthew Highton (last seen here taking the same approach to remaking the Buffy credits), and features brand X actors standing in for the cartoon family. There’s a boy aimlessly drawing on a chalkboard and a skateboarder jumping some stairs as Bart, a very professional-looking nuclear scientist and a guy falling asleep in his car playing Homer, a sax-playing teenager as Lisa, and smiling kids pretending to drive with their moms as Marge and Maggie. None of it really fits together. It’s great.
The Simpsons’ intro sequence has been remade plenty of times by people using Animal Crossing models, psychedelic animation, and Cowboy Bebop’s aesthetic, but Highton’s stock footage stands out for its willingness to give us flesh-and-blood recreations of a cartoon sequence burned forever into our brains. Now that this precedent has been set, it’s probably only a matter of time before we get a version of the “Steamed Hams” scene with some would-be actors comically over-emoting in stock roles like “angry man in suit” and “worried home chef.”
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14 Comments
It’s weird watching this without sound. It’s like that sequence of images just makes the music play in your head.
That was just wonderful! Really! I mean it. Great job. You are so creative. Now would you do as your father asked and take out the trash?
ok.
Eh, not to be a kill joy but… not that good. As a guy who had a job where a large part of my work was looking at stock footage/images, I think there has to be better footage to be used for this. While watching, i found myself wondering how many stock images out there were created in direct reference to Simpsons scenes.
On the one hand, at least it’s not a lame mashup or a list of dumb, unfunny Twitter comments. On the other hand, this is still pretty bad.
I mean it’s not the worst thing ever and the first 15 seconds or so is pretty good but after that it’s just nothing close given how it’s just any stock footage that is barely “ballpark” of the intro.Bart skateboarding on a crowded street becomes women longboarding slowly on a bridge…
The response to this seems unreasonably harsh given that it was just done casually by some dude for his 500 subscriber youtube channel.
Vastly prefer the Cowboy Bebop version.
this charmingly reminded me of something that would have been on youtube in the early days of the platform.
Well. At least it’s not another “The Simpsons Predicted [broad news subject]” article.
No skateboard on the belly of Barney, causing a comedic burp?One star.
Go to your room, Internet.