Who is "Destiny Pictures", and has there been anything similar to this video before?

Question

The Washington Post news article Reporters thought this video was North Korea propaganda. It came from the White House. includes a five minute video shown in Singapore immediately before the US president engaged with reporters following his one-on-one discussion with the leader of North Korea.

Reporters crowded into a Singapore auditorium Tuesday, expecting President Trump to walk out and announce the results of his historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Suddenly, two huge screens on either side of the empty podium came to life. Soaring music boomed over the speakers, and the reporters were bombarded with a montage portraying North Korea as some sort of paradise.

Golden sunrises, gleaming skylines and high-speed trains. Children skipping through Kim Il Sung square in Pyongyang. North Korean flags fluttering between images of Egyptian pyramids, the Taj Mahal and the Lincoln Memorial.

[...] The film was not North Korean propaganda. It had been made in America, by or on the orders of his White House, for the benefit of Kim.

[...] The nearly five-minute movie even had its own Hollywood-style vanity logo: “A Destiny Pictures Production,” though a film company by the same name in Los Angeles denied any involvement in making it, and the White House has not yet responded to questions about it.

Question: Who is "Destiny Pictures", and has there been anything similar to this video before?

White House API reporter Zeke Miller called the video Michael Bay-esque:

Haven't seen this before: Before POTUS comes out for press conference, WH shows a Michael Bay-esque video showing Trump and Kim, military weapons, bombs

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YouTube version of the video thanks to Motherboard, thanks to @Michael_B's comment.

https://youtu.be/A838gS8nwas

Answer 1

Garret Marquis, a National Security Council spokesman, said:

"The video was created by the NSC to help the President demonstrate the benefits of complete denuclearization, and a vision of a peaceful and prosperous Korean Peninsula," Garrett Marquis, a NSC spokesman, said in a statement.

So it appears that they just used the name "Destiny Pictures" to represent that the video was showing the two countries' destinies, and it in fact has no relation to the real, California-based Destiny Pictures.

As for other situations like this, at the end of their April summit Kim Jong-Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in watched a "highly produced video, backed by inspirational music, that highlighted the ceremonies they had just conducted during the day." - NY Times

Answer 2

Question: Who is "Destiny Pictures", and has there been anything similar to this video before?

Am not certain precisely "Who" "Destiny Pictures" is.

Yes, there are examples in recent history which could be considered similar to the video.

The initial impression of the film here was that the narration was similar to the game show announcer, "Phil Hilton", from The Running Man (1987), see also Everything Wrong With The Running Man. The production might have been trying for a Blade Runner (1982) motif, though no remake of that film has succeeded thus far.

We can remain within the decade of the 1980's for examples of propaganda artwork, computer generated graphics and films (Strategic Defense Initiative Promo Video "High Frontier" Star Wars Defense System 33112; STAR WARS - Strategic Defense Initiative) relating to the Strategic Defense Initiative (see also Strategic Defense Initiative by Jason Saltoun-Ebin), which was delivered presented to the public at President Ronald Reagan's so-called "Star Wars" speech on March 23, 1983.

The speech by President Reagan is audio and video: a film, albeit without the bells and whistles of the production of "A Story of Opportunity", though nonetheless containing similar themes, one being space; where the speech by President Reagan was coined as the "Star Wars" speech, the recent production begins with a space scene; the launching of at least one missile from the ground.

We can also look to Colin Powell's Speech at the UN Colin Powell's Speech at the UN as a trailer for a "film" where the Secretary of State was reading from a carefully crafted script; whether an individual believes that "Weapons of Mass Destruction" existed in Iraq at the time, or exist now within the theory of being in the hands of other groups, after the fact, is irrelevant to the question of whether or not the awareness that the "film" would reach the public of the world at large. In short order the war in Iraq was "filmed" and broadcast to the world.

Noam Chomsky has several lectures which critically examines propaganda in the media; including Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, Noam Chomsky, and a "film", Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992), both in the form of print and video ("film"; i.e.g., "the news") media.

Neither the concept of nor the content of the film is novel.