These tutorials sell for almost $300, with two or three versions in a pack selling for up $700. Of course, like any other media they get pirated so when Fstoppers were ready to release Photographing the World 3, they released it themselves on torrent sites a few days before retail.
Well, that’s what they wanted the world to believe.
“I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all downloaded ‘something’ illegally in the past. Whether it’s an MP3 years ago or a movie or a TV show, and occasionally you download something and it turns out it was kinda like a Rick Roll,” says Locardi.
“So we kept talking and we thought it would be a good idea to create this dummy lesson or shadow tutorial that was actually a fake and then seed it on BitTorrent.”
Where Fstoppers normally go to beautiful and exotic international locations, for their fake they decided to go to an Olive Garden in Charleston, South Carolina. Yet despite the clear change of location, they wanted people to believe the tutorial was legitimate.
“We wanted to ride this constant line of ‘Is this for real? Could this possibly be real? Is Elia [Locardi] joking right now? I don’t think he’s joking, he’s being totally serious’,” says Lee Morris, one of the co-owners of Fstoppers.
People really have to watch the tutorial to see what a fantastic job Fstoppers did in achieving that goal. For anyone unfamiliar with their work, the tutorial is initially hard to spot as a fake and even for veterans the level of ambiguity is really impressive.
However, when the tutorial heads back to the studio, where the post-processing lesson gets underway, there can be no doubt that something is amiss.
Things start off normally with serious teaching, then over time, the tutorial gets more and more ridiculous. Then, when the camera cuts away to show Locardi forming a ‘mask’ on an Olive Garden image, there can be no confusion.
In order to get the tutorial out to the world, the site created its own torrent. They had never done anything like it before so got some associates to upload the huge 25GB+ package to The Pirate Bay and have their friends seed it. Then, in order to get past more savvy users on the site, they had other people come in and give the torrent good (but fake) reviews.
Screenshots provided by Fstoppers taken months ago reveal hundreds of downloaders. And, according to Morris, the fake became the most-downloaded Photographing the World 3 torrent online, meaning that the “majority of downloaders” got the comedy version.
Also of interest is the feedback Fstoppers got following their special release. Emails flooded in from pirates, some of whom were confused while others were upset at the ‘quality’ of the tutorial.
“The whole time we were thinking: ‘This isn’t even on the market yet! You guys are totally stealing this and emailing us and complaining about it,” says Fstoppers co-owner Patrick Hall.
While the tutorial itself is brilliant, Fstoppers points to a certain hypocrisy within its target audience of photographers, who themselves have to put up with a lot of online piracy of their work. Yet, clearly, many are happy to pirate the work of other photographers in order to make their own art better.
All that being said, the exercise is certainly an interesting one and the creativity behind the hoax puts it head and shoulders above more aggressive anti-piracy campaigns. However, when TF tracked down the torrent on The Pirate Bay last evening, it’s popularity had nosedived.
While it was initially downloaded by a lot of eager photographers, probably encouraged by the fake comments placed on the site by Fstoppers, the torrent is now only being shared by less than 10 people. As usual, the Pirate Bay users appear to have caught on, flagging the torrent as a fake. The moderators, it seems, have also deleted the fake comments.
While most people won’t want to download a 25GB torrent to see what Fstoppers came up with, the site has uploaded the fake tutorial to YouTube. It’s best viewed alongside their other work, which is sensational, but people should get a good idea by watching the explanation below.
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