Wait are you sure the whole thing was an animation? It's hard to tell but at least some of it looks real... Is that mentioned in the article?

I would guess that if it is a real trumpet the props department went down to the local used instrument store and picked up the cheapest Yamaha in the discount bin. But, the way the trumpet crumples doesn't quite look realistic to me.

I know it's actually hard to tell. There's definitely some CGI in there. But a lot of it looks pretty real too. But the issue with it was the destruction of all of the creative tools. So it's in some ways not quite as bad if it's not real.

> animation

I'm betting mostly CGI actually.

Some bits are obviously physically impossible, so definitely CGI.

I can be persuaded that some shots are real+CGI, and squished into the larger CGI view. They might have crushed a few "things" to see how they would fail, and then CGI'ed up a final version.

The wide shots do not look real. The lighting is not believable. The failure modes of many individual items are not believable. The whole pancaking effect of the big crush is not believable.

I understand the discomfort at seeing wanton destruction. It bothers me to see great old houses or cars get wrecked for movies, for example.

Nowadays, most of that is fake.

And I think almost all of this ad is fake as well.

Even if it is a cheap one, it's still wrong. I have the same visceral gut reaction to seeing a musical instrument get destroyed as I do to seeing a book burnt. I own a lot of very expensive, very nice instruments. However, some of my favourite music I have created has been on dirt cheap charity shop instruments.

It's just the shear waste of it all that strikes me. Like so many of those things cost so much money to the people that could use or want them. So many high-paid tech workers are already out-of-touch with what most people consider affordable that I'm not surprised their marketing team thought this was ok.

But most artists are starving, and we live in a world where waste like this isn't really morally acceptable.

A virtual facsimile of destruction can still elicit an emotional response. Ever heard of "Happy Tree Friends"?

It's like a dog whistle. People who care about this are not unhealthy, they are having a visceral reaction to something that you don't understand the significance of. Try curiosity instead of dismissiveness.