Here are seven photographs of trucks that have been circulating on the web and in people’s emails. This one below is bottle that appears to stick out onto the road. These photos are said to be real trucks painted to give an illusion the image is standing out but in fact none of them are real paintings. They might be another viral marketing trick similar to the cell phone popcorn hoax. You can still see the the original mail of the trucks I received here.
Below is a Photoshop comparison I made. Once a mask is drawn into the truck is it now much easer to insert any image onto the truck.
The image below shows two different contrast or histogram levels between the pouch and the truck indicating a retouch photo.
Below: The image below shows no shading on the edge of the billboard and remain focused as it becomes further away.
Below: Poor quality on the real truck but good quality on the yellow truck.
Below: Again, showing different contrast.
Below: The same brick post and tree on all the images. This time the scene is motion blurred. You might need to click “view larger” to see the bricks.
Below: Bad contrast. The person doing the hoax or editing might want to invest on a better quality camera and lens to capture the picture of the truck.
Ethically, revealing the work of an illusionist is wrong. But in a few circumstance they can be revealed when the author is passing them as though they are real. The illusionist should present their work as-is and let the audience decide.
Edit 8-31-08: I recently got an email response indicating that they are most likely a hijacked advertising competition photos fooling bloggers and email readers. This site here http://www.snopes.com/photos/arts/truckart.asp points out that the are just advertising competitions photos.
I always like to see it on the real truck, especially driving down the highway and you’d see nice furniture, it’s like going window-shopping.
One of our companies have something similar to this called ‘Vehicle Wrap’ where they’d take your photo and blend in with the background of choice and paint or they called it wrapped around the vehicle, it’s a great form of advertising, but I’m not sure if I’d like to see my face driving down the street, sometimes it could be very distracting especially if it has busy background. The manager there has one wrapped around a Toyota Highlander, and the photo that’s wrapped around is a young lady holding an umbrella, sort of the idea that ‘you’re cover under our roof’, then one day his wife when out to the garage, and the vehicle was parked in there and the picture almost gave her a heart attack because she thought it was a real person standing there smiling, holding an umbrella.
I’m sure the illusionist artwork, what could be produced in the computer can be wrapped around the truck or vehicle, I think its kind of neat, moving art.
That’s amazing that people can print out images on a wide bed printer and glue them on to trucks and cars.
There is this truck in town that drives around with two billboard (one on each side) that changes the huge banner every minute. Gas prices here are $4.50 a gallon and I think he should run electric instead instead of gasoline. Most of the time he’s just stuck in traffic.
There is another aerial company around here that prints dot matrix smoke in the sky that reads, “DONATE BLOOD.”
I got an email from someone who pointed out that it was supposed to be a “digital mock-ups created for a competition. Seven winners were selected (with the Pepsi design taking first place).” Upon further searching I found a webpage http://www.snopes.com/photos/arts/truckart.asp with an explanation. If this claim is true then these photos are part of an email hoax hacked against the the knowledge of the real event holders.
The email hoax was a cut and paste from a page like this http://www.wltc.org/Documents/TruckArt.htm causing many to believe that they were real. While it is obvious that they were pranks, I need to be sure that they weren’t.
Awesome artwork!!!