Source: RNS

(RNS) The footage, to gamers who like to play “Grand Theft Auto,” looks familiar. From the point of view of a gunman looking for targets through the speeding car’s window, unsuspecting people take bullets in the chest, and crumple to the ground.

But it’s not “Grand Theft Auto.” It’s propaganda created by the group that calls itself the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. And the people lying motionless on the ground are real. Then they die many times over on social media, after the Islamic State posts these executions on Twitter and elsewhere online.

Javier Lesaca, a scholar who has spent hundreds of hours studying ISIS videos, says the terrorist organization has masterfully mimicked not only the look and feel of popular, violent games such as “Grand Theft Auto” and “Call of Duty,” but television shows — “Homeland,” “Saw,” and “Person of Interest,” to name a few — which, like the video games, feature strapping young men in cool sunglasses who kill without mercy.

“This aesthetic is not bin Laden sitting in a cave,” said Lesaca, a visiting scholar at George Washington University, referring to the static video released by al-Qaida after 9/11. “This is not the old, dusty terrorist without teeth. Nobody wants to be that.”

The Islamic State knows that disaffected young people who love playing the gunman in “Grand Theft Auto” may take interest in a real brotherhood that promises to bring the world on the screen to life.

ISIS possesses a level of cinematographic sophistication — coined “Hollywood visual style” by communication experts Cori Dauber and Mark Robinson — that simulates the high-quality production values expected by viewers raised on American movies. Its skill, many academics and counterterrorism officials agree, presents a uniquely modern challenge to those trying to combat the terrorist group.

“By producing video products that largely meet industry standards ISIS is doing something no terrorist group we know of has ever done before,” write Dauber and Robinson, in a piece on ISIS’s videography. Working at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, they have dissected Islamic State videos to understand their use of color, camera angles, special effects, graphics and composition.

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ISIS puts cameras on its fighters so that its videos have that first person perspective, making the viewer feel that he experiences the action for himself. It’s the same technique used in popular and often violent video games, but also for televised sport events, says Dauber. The NFL, for example, attaches small cameras to players’ helmets. The result — as anyone who watched the last Super Bowl knows — is a visceral experience of the action that raises heartbeats and draws spectators to the edge of their seats.

From Lesaca’s vast library of videos, he pulls out one on a typical theme: battle. It opens like a television drama, with the camera panning across the group, and then closes in on individuals — attractive, smiling tough guys wearing military garb and brandishing automatic weapons. Each seems to have an identifying characteristic — a bright scarf, a gold tooth. The viewer follows them through battle as if he or she is one of them. The story ends in victory, set to rousing music. Within ISIS propaganda, familiar images pop up — a man in handcuffs, for example, that recalls a particularly memorable interrogation scene from the Showtime series “Homeland.”

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