Product-placement within films and television programmes is an entirely pernicious and dangerous trend, according to the chief executive of Bord Scannan na hEireann.
Mr Rod Stoneman said commercial sponsorship must be kept separate from the editorial process, and added that to his knowledge, the film board had not funded any film which included product placements.
Clearly, it did not help the creative process if a guy had to stand there for six minutes showing his watch off to show its make. How did that help the process of movie making? It was a weird distortion that was close to subliminal, he said.
Mr Stoneman was speaking at The Big Picture 2, a conference on trends in the film and television industry in Clarinbridge, Co Galway.
Earlier, a consultant with Farrell Grant Sparks, Ms Lynda Gaynor, told the conference that developments in digital technology would make such product placements easier to manage in the future. She outlined a possible scenario for the industry where a programme-maker might shoot a scene in a soap opera with a jar of coffee sitting on a kitchen table.
The coffee jar could be shot with a blank label, and the programme maker could then hire out the space on the label to different coffee companies, depending on the intended market or the different countries in which the soap would be broadcast.
Such switches, known as enviromercials in the US, could be easily accomplished by the digital manipulation of images, allowing the programme-maker to attract advertising that previously went to broadcasters.
This would fundamentally alter the power relationship between the programme-maker and the broadcaster. In some cases the broadcaster would end up as little more than an agency that hired out broadcasting time to the programme-maker, she said.
The Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Ms de Valera, told the conference that creative artists should not allow themselves to be subverted by the temptations of technology. With the breathtaking speed of technological advances, too often the artist could feel swamped by technology, she said, which could seem to overwhelm and indeed marginalise culture and the creative urge. The artist could see technology as an enemy.
Automation, speed and the ubiquitous reach of technology could delude us into believing that technology did not relate to, belong to or contribute to culture. It could sometimes seem that a culture-free society was being built in which, as in science fiction movies, everyone was the same except for the strangely modelled faces.
Ms de Valera said artists must not turn their backs on technological developments which, while they could pose challenges and threats, were also full of rich and exciting potential for the expression of creativity.
Delegates at the conference were shocked by the news that the home and lifelong work of the celebrated documentary-maker, John T. Davis, were destroyed by fire on December 1st. The fire destroyed some original master footage of works such as Dust on the Bible and Hobo and his camera equipment and lenses. A support fund has been set up by Loopline Film in Dublin.