An excellent 17-minute video from The Art Of Storytelling that analyzes the now-infamous 2021 Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse introduction video:

What I liked about it is that the author goes beyond cheap shots and deeper into both storytelling aspects (drawing from his experience)…

Now, as you can tell, the big problem with the design and execution of this video is that the producers failed to recognize the importance of point of view in telling this story. Now, perspective is already very important in any film, but it’s doubly important in a film for which one’s point of view in reality is also the subject. But this failure is present even in some of the more mundane parts of the film like the interviews that Mark does with various meta staff members. Now, as it’s plain to see, these are not real interviews. They’re fully scripted and staged – again, a classic mistake in corporate film. You can even tell that they’re not looking at each other. They’re clearly reading from a teleprompter. Yikes.

Of course, the entire premise of an interview is that two people are speaking candidly. So watching an obviously fake interview can be deeply unsettling as the speakers try to act out natural conversation and inevitably fail. This is why so many people in this video, including Mark, seem to not know what to do with their hands while speaking. It’s because they’ve been told to act naturally in a social situation that does not normally exist.

…and the meaning of these kinds of propaganda-esque announcements:

They are joined by some friends who are calling from Soho to tell them about some cool augmented reality street art that they’ve just discovered. […] And with a wave of his hand, Mark teleports the artwork into his spaceship so that he can appreciate it for himself, thus extracting this street art from any sense of place and context, which is the point of street art. I know this might sound like a nitpick, but I think it’s just worth lingering on the fact that, you know, in this high concept tech demo about how this technology will empower people to appreciate art in new ways. Nobody paused to ask what the social and cultural function of street art actually is.

The entire introduction video comes across as thoughtless and careless – “It’s not a product launch or even a demo. It’s just a cartoon about the world Mark Zuckerberg is telling you that you will one day live in.” – and some of the observations here will be relevant to other things, even in other mediums: UI redesign minisites, the font announcements articles, rebrand unveils, and so on.

I would love similar analyses of Apple’s stuff – not just the most obvious parallel which would be the 1987 Knowledge Navigator vision video, but some of the more recent scripted virtual keynotes, too.