By John Walker on November 30th, 2009 at 10:33 pm.
I’ve been pondering looking into the role computers play in TV and movies, simply because it’s quite so hilariously silly. From Bones’ 3D hologram-o-machine (best I can find thanks to the joy of Fox) that can instantly conjure any murderous scenario the cast think of, to those peculiar PCs all film stars use that require only rapid keyboard inputs despite their clearly cursor-orientated design. I also find myself peculiarly interested in collecting together the names of all the Google alternatives films and television use. My favourite has to be the ludicrously clumsy “Finder-Spyder” that crops up all over the place, notably Heroes, Hung and Prison Break. Although Dexter’s “NetScope” is impressively wrong too. I mention all this after being pointed toward this fabulous site from the man who is responsible for so many of the more impressive interfaces you see in films, Mark Coleran.
For instance, I remember enjoying Tomb Raider’s Star Trek meets Winamp design rather a lot. That was him.
There’s Mission Impossible 3:
Or how about The Bourne Ultimatum?
So he’s the good guy, and I recommend looking through the graphics he’s responsible for.
But what are your favourite and least favourite movie and TV representations of PCs? Not the full-on Minority Report swishy magic computers (I realise I cheated with the Bones reference above, but it’s the most gloriously silly computer in all of TV), but the ones where people sit furiously tapping away as the screen somehow animates a face. Oh, and any other made up search engines you’ve spotted, too. Together we’ll compile something amazing.
Thanks to Martin for the link.
30/11/2009 at 22:38 Tei says:
In the matrix movie the girl use nmap to search for open ports.
$ nmap youriphere
so not all movies and tv shows get it all wrong. One get it right.
01/12/2009 at 01:19 Leelad says:
Did you just refer to Trinity as “the girl”?
Quite shocking.
01/12/2009 at 04:16 ascagnel says:
If only the rest of the movie was bearable…
30/11/2009 at 22:39 Thiefsie says:
I just watched Firewall again… and it was full of Windows XP – so was 100% legit… and didn’t feel like product placement… and the mobile phones were generic pap as well.
There was Dell all over the server boxes though, and very boring cmd like interfaces for those.
Funny… the 2 screens you’ve posted above are VERY similar – I wonder how much this guy gets paid to rejig a few screens in photoshop
30/11/2009 at 22:52 John Walker says:
Oh crikey, why would you ever REWATCH Firewall?!
And look at the full range of stuff he’s done, and remember that they’re animated interfaces, not static images.
30/11/2009 at 23:02 Thiefsie says:
I know I know… well it was Sunday night and the girl was happy in front of that… haha.
As for his work… yes I am totally downplaying his job and yes interfaces are ridiculously hard to design… but… world maps, LCD style text (on a screen no less??)
Not terribly impressive.
What I would like to know… is does he design a ‘video’ in time with what the actors are doing or is his stuff actually interactive like a flash game or something.
I bet he gets all the ladies saying he designed the interface for the computer nerds in Tomb Raider. haha.
02/12/2009 at 17:25 Damien Stark says:
Actually, I’ll second the (semi) legitimacy (not necessarily quality) of Firewall. I’m a network engineer, and the “boring command line stuff” they were typing actually somewhat resembled real world “access-lists”.
I wouldn’t vouch for their syntax or anything, but I remember being amazed to see actual IOS-type syntax and access-lists, rather than the Hackers-style “whack-a-mole” game to stop intruders.
30/11/2009 at 22:44 Dood says:
Independence Day
30/11/2009 at 22:45 ChampionHyena says:
In the future, all computers will come equipped with minuscule boxes of quickly-scrolling squinty-ass text standard (to simplify your computing experience).
30/11/2009 at 22:49 Mack says:
I love this… my wife and I always poke fun at the TV when say, they take a really terrible CCTV picture of someone’s arse as they, say, stab their victim with a pencil, only to have the commanding, intelligent lead tell the geek at the keyboard to increase the resolution and make a match, only for seconds later (after much flicking of identities) a face, name, address, and full bio are onscreen. I know the FBI has some pretty terrific image analysis going on… but come on…
It makes me wonder why they employ humans AT ALL
OR NO the best is Smallville
so say, there are these people that have been mutated by kryptonite, and and Clark and Chloe (?) need to find out more about them, so I know, just do a web search! Hey look, there they are, face, address, name, bio WHY DIDN’T WE THINK OF THAT? And wait, we think that Lex Luthor is hiding something. Hmm. A warehouse with something special in it. LETS DO A WEB SEARCH!
OH YEAH! Look there it is. Can we see it on street view? Hey! I know that pizza place next door! Awesome!!!
so yes.
Nothing interesting from me but I appreciate this entry very much. Thank you.
30/11/2009 at 22:55 John Walker says:
FlashForward may be a stinking turd of a show, but surprisingly they at least take the video enhancement thing a bit more seriously. It takes them a full month for the top experts in the country to enhance a video enough to see a ring on a guy’s finger, but not his face. It’s still nonsense, obviously, which does have the rather unfortunate counter-effect of making them just look rubbish at it compared to everyone else in TV land.
01/12/2009 at 00:14 Clovis says:
Oblig. tv tropes link: Enhance Button.
30/11/2009 at 22:51 Norskov says:
I always found the virus assembly scene in Swordfish hilarious.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUJFOuHIS4Q
01/12/2009 at 02:01 Matt says:
As a computer programmer, I always appreciated that scene, even as outrageous as it was. It’s one of the only times in a movie where the workflow of programming was followed even a little bit. Basically, it’s: Think about what you’re writing. Think some more. Write a little bit. Fail. Swear. Think some more. Write some more. Get it part working. Dance. Repeat (usually with fails sprinkled a little more liberally in there).
As exaggerated as it is, it beats most movie hacking scenes. “It’s off limits – it’s got the best encryption I’ve ever seen!”. “I need you to get me in there” Clickityclick. “Done”.
02/12/2009 at 17:38 Damien Stark says:
Seconded. As silly as it is (3 x 3 grid of monitors to “assemble” the worm?) I love that scene. Something about the way that it depicts the process as “one guy in a room by himself for hours, with music on, taking occasional wine breaks” felt far truer to me than the “spinning phone booth” stuff of Hackers, or the “people standing over your shoulder as you tap in two or three lines of code for 30 seconds” of nearly all other movies.
30/11/2009 at 22:51 greenB says:
TV’s “Veronica Mars” mostly made sense computer-wise (let’s not talk about the series finale here). Also, I found V’s favorite search engine Planet Zowie to be realistic (probably because it basically was Google).
30/11/2009 at 23:52 Blackberries says:
Veronica Mars is indeed pretty acceptable when it comes to this sort of thing, though it still falls into the omnipresent trap of having applications make “computer bleeps” every time they perform an action.
Plus the (P.I. exclusive?) persons database that is frequently made use of stretches my credulity somewhat. I know such databases claim to exist, but I’m sceptical as to just how exhaustive the information provided might be/how many people are really listed – especially considering how often case-solving depends on its use.
That said, still a great show. Coincidentally enough, I was just this moment about to watch an episode..
01/12/2009 at 10:12 Schmung says:
Was just about to bring up Veronica Mars as well. The PI database was indeed a fortuitous bit of tech, containing it seemed it seemed information collated from credit card companies, the DMV and social security. But hey, it was otherwise not utterly terrible as far as their depiction of computers and stuff.
30/11/2009 at 22:53 Floor says:
I remember the virus builder from Swordfish- it was 9 screens- the virus was visualised by a cube. to build the virus, the guy had to get all of the smaller cubes onto the main screen, part of the larger cube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUJFOuHIS4Q
30/11/2009 at 22:54 Railick says:
My favorite fake-o-computer screen is the one in the new James Bond movies Casino Royal and whatever the other one is called. It shows them with a table that is a touchable computer screen and some how turning the pictures and what not makes them get larger and give more info then he moves them off the edge of the table with a flick of his wrist causing the picure to move to the wall so they can see a huge blown up version of it, very cool and I’d love to play some turn based strat games on that thing :P
I think it was also the newest Bond movie where he took a picture of someones face from behind and some how the camera was able to get a picture of their face from the front O.o
Shadowcat “It hammers at my retinas like an evil woodpecker of pure energy”
30/11/2009 at 22:58 CJD says:
I don’t think that’s fake. Microsoft Surface is capable of doing things much like that.
30/11/2009 at 23:03 Railick says:
Have you seen the part I’m talking about? I know microsoft surface allows touch screen ect they never really seemed to type in anything if my memory servers and they had full access to data bases with peoples bios and pictures and all he had to do with turn files to open them like it was some key he was turning and let him flick them all over the walls ect. I’m sure it is possible in real life but I doubt the system itself in this case was something real.
Regardless I don’t think there are any cameras that can take a picture of your head from behind and somehow capture your face , I could be wrong :P
01/12/2009 at 04:20 ascagnel says:
I happened to catch that bit on Friday (it was on “SyFy” here in the US, and more on why that name sucks balls later). I think that was just a mockup, but MS Surface is supposed to have those capabilities. You just need to tie it into something.
30/11/2009 at 23:01 Floor says:
Damn. Beaten.
30/11/2009 at 23:03 Jonas says:
Yeah Swordfish was the one I immediately thought of as well :P
CSI often does quite poorly as well, especially CSI: Miami – not just the most infamous examples, they really generally do a lot of stupid stuff with computers.
01/12/2009 at 00:34 Bret says:
Really, CSI Miami and reality don’t come into contact often.
The point is the horrifically bad one liners followed by the sunglasses and the scream from Won’t Get Fooled Again.
01/12/2009 at 04:21 ascagnel says:
YEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
30/11/2009 at 23:04 MacBeth says:
I was also going to go with Swordfish, but for the ‘other’ scene
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUY8HysBzsE
30/11/2009 at 23:08 monchberter says:
Oh my god, the stupid stupid 3D graphics file control system in Jurassic Park. Why have a quick to use GUI when one that take ten seconds to find a single file through a map type affair?
Why?
Because Sam Neil is trying to hold a door shut behind which there is a Velociraptor and you need dramatic tension to occur before the door locks will work.
30/11/2009 at 23:18 Velvet Fist, Iron Glove says:
Jurassic park you say? Because that one actually was a real file manager: http://www.siliconbunny.com/fsn-the-irix-3d-file-system-tool-from-jurassic-park/
30/11/2009 at 23:32 ZamFear says:
The Jurassic Park one is a real GUI though.
“I know this, this is UNIX!”
30/11/2009 at 23:34 monchberter says:
Real, but no less infuriating
30/11/2009 at 23:35 ZamFear says:
Ow. Ninja’d.
01/12/2009 at 04:27 ascagnel says:
Reverse real — the SGI demo came out after Jurassic Park, as proof they could do something similar in real-time. That said, the movie is pretty faithful, beyond the whole “Live Stream is an MPEG” thing.
30/11/2009 at 23:08 LewieP says:
The voice interface used in the “Short Circuit” films is pretty ace.
30/11/2009 at 23:09 Heliosicle says:
Diehard 4 was full of people using some pretty badass interfaces, I think the hacker guy was using Linux or something though. That swordfish scene was pretty ridiculous ‘CMON CMON YEEESSS’
01/12/2009 at 00:13 Magrippinho says:
In Live Free or Die Hard, I especially loved that they could rig a computer to blow up over the net, but for it to actually blow up, the user has to press the escape key.
To clarify, the bad guys can wirelessly turn your PC into a bomb, but they can’t simulate a keystroke.
30/11/2009 at 23:13 Railick says:
No one is going to mention Hackers? The bad guys key board and computer were freaking awesome, also when they went into 3d goggle cyber space to hack the worm that was pretty awesome :)
30/11/2009 at 23:13 monchberter says:
Let me also draw your attention to this. Warning, a peek will result in full submergence in the trope universe:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeepingComputers
01/12/2009 at 09:37 pimorte says:
Monchberter you are an evil evil (wo)man.
One day I will write a virus that blocks TVTropes in every Windows hostsfile, and boost world productivity by 10%.
30/11/2009 at 23:14 Krondonian says:
It has to be CSI.
They did the ENHANCE more barefacedly than anything I’ve seen (parodied wonderfully here: http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/640/csi21.jpg, which yes, is very old).
Seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uoM5kfZIQ0&feature=related
And amusingly by Red Dwarf: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU
30/11/2009 at 23:15 monchberter says:
Also:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExtremeGraphicalRepresentation
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ViewerFriendlyInterface
30/11/2009 at 23:17 Stupoider says:
If I remember correctly, didn’t Small Soldiers have some sort of computer-jiggerypockery?
30/11/2009 at 23:22 Railick says:
I wish I could find it while I’m at work but one of my co-workers sent me something crazy. It is actaully suposed to be “real” but this guy takes photos of ufos and uses CSI like magic to enchance the photos so that you can actaully see aliens heads in the windows of the space ship (when the photo itself is blurry and the ufo in question is about a cm wide if it were to be printed on a normal sized picture)
30/11/2009 at 23:28 Spork says:
Small Soldiers had a great 3 field search iirc: “chips” “lots of chips” “state of the art chips”. And lo! the toymaker gets his hands on half a million military chips.
Technically the Bones 3D thing isn’t completely out there, there’s a ’3D’ projector that uses steam as a backdrop, looks quite impressive imo.
Also Wargames for a good demonstration of wardialling, and giving us the game global thermonuclear warfare (must find my floppy with that on-damn no FDD).
30/11/2009 at 23:36 monchberter says:
And DEFCON. Surely the greatest love letter to televised computing
30/11/2009 at 23:32 M.P. says:
I concur, that bit in Swordfish was terrible! :)
30/11/2009 at 23:37 obo says:
Johnny Mnemonic.
30/11/2009 at 23:40 Dr_Ham says:
What a fantastically awful film, genius.
01/12/2009 at 00:03 obo says:
I CAN CRASH YOU FROM HERE, MAN!
02/12/2009 at 15:01 KindredPhantom says:
Doesn’t count because it is a cyberpunk movie and the computers in cyberpunk are on the far end of the spectrum.
Plus the blog post is about tv/movies portraying modern computers and computing.
30/11/2009 at 23:39 Ryx says:
I watched Eagle Eye recently and I was somewhat impressed by the relatively realistic looking cell phones and computers in it until it got near the end when (SPOILERS) they start talking to a giant (‘orange tech’ as I like to put it ) AI more advanced than anything ever created, with the ability to speak perfectly, created by one man.
02/12/2009 at 17:47 Damien Stark says:
I give them some props at least for the plot twist explaining why the AI “went bad” – as opposed to nearly every other AI movie that just generally assumes all AI will turn evil and seek to destroy all humans. An interesting twist that’s actually happened to humans in other conspiracy movies.
30/11/2009 at 23:40 Railick says:
Lawnmower Man 2 ? (hides)
30/11/2009 at 23:46 Stu says:
http://www.search-wise.net is a fake search engine that’s been used on EastEnders and Doctor Who.
30/11/2009 at 23:51 Idle Threats & Bad Poetry says:
If we’re complaining about science in TV shows, let’s talk Heroes. I watched the first season in the spring and wasn’t impressed after the first few episode.
That Indian scientist dude is able to search the DNA of the whole world to find super mutants and their frigging home phone numbers!
Of course, that only builds on the even greater abusrdity that the show uses Darwinian evolution, a slow accumulation of gradual changes over time, to explain time travel, flying, and crap. You write a show about super heroes, and by default you’re going to attract comic geeks, and you expect them not to notice that your science is absolute crap. You might as friggin’ well be saying the earth is flipping flat!
And it had overuse of time travel. What is with the time travel bandwagon?? Lost, Heroes, the new Star Trek movie, why can’t anyone write a decent scii-fi-ish plot without time friggin’ travel!?* It’s worse than the zombie current craze, because you can’t use zombies to retcon the whole friggin course of history!
*(Disclaimer: I don’t watch much TV or movies, so the scope of my observations is limited, but, blimey, I’m ticked off anyway.)
30/11/2009 at 23:51 jonfitt says:
In the X-Files they would type emails on some white text on blue background version of DOS with a HUGE FONT.
Clearly both Mulder and Scully were severely short sighted.
30/11/2009 at 23:52 jonfitt says:
Also, some of Mark Coleran’s ideas would make cool game interfaces.
30/11/2009 at 23:55 Pantsman says:
My favorite one so far is in the first Transformers movie, where the audio analyst takes the recording that the Pentagon is trying to decipher and brings it to her young tech wiz friend. He sticks it in his computer, loads up a winamp-esque audio-editing software displaying the audio file as a wave, as you might see in any audio-editor suite. He instantly realizes that it’s encoded, and hits a few buttons, causing the wave to rotate on the screen to show it’s underside, in which one can see the emblem of the Decepticons.
01/12/2009 at 03:04 vagabond says:
The Decepticons are clearly just giving a shout out to Aphex Twin in their code, and that bit is just the filler in their buffer overflow attack :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphex_Twin#Artwork
01/12/2009 at 00:03 Railick says:
I know this is kind of out there but
I loved the pull out paper thing computer screens in Red Planet with Val Kilmer, I’d love to have one of those and on a similiar note there is a comerical out for a certain credit card where the guys credit card is actually a computer in and of itself and allows him to choose when to pay his purchases and ect with a holographic interface that pops up out of the card , I’d LOVE to have that for real :)
01/12/2009 at 00:09 Jimmy says:
I always recall the flashy, swishy, and downright amusing screens in . In the previous link, the kid (Brandis) finds a virus in the system with ‘watchdogs’.
For extreme flashiness and a war of swashbuckling click-clacking, see the .
I know you want the verosimile stuff, but I had to get this one out of my head..
01/12/2009 at 00:11 Jimmy says:
Damm xtml tags…
I always recall the flashy, swishy, and downright amusing screens in Seaquest DSV In the previous link, the kid (Brandis) finds a virus in the system with ‘watchdogs’.
For extreme flashiness and a war of swashbuckling click-clacking, see the next link.
I know you want the verosimile stuff, but I had to get this one out of my head..
01/12/2009 at 00:12 gulag says:
Hackers – Love that WASD hacking.
Also, Angelina Jolie boobies.
01/12/2009 at 00:33 reginald says:
its really comforting to know that I can blame 15 years of bad GUI design in films, on one guy. I think games sometimes get it right, because the designers are effectively staring at Maya, 3Dstudio, Photoshop, and similar programs all day long, they know what a wireframe 3d view of a building would look like, particularly how cheap and simple it would look.
01/12/2009 at 01:07 St4ud3 says:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2rGTXHvPCQ
The IRC explanation on this Numb3rs episode was just ridiculously wrong. The show tries to incorporate real math, but unfortunately they don’t have any clue about computers.
01/12/2009 at 01:10 Spacewalk says:
Oh I just love the displays on board the glider that Kurt Russel has to pilot into NYC in Escape From New York because it uses vectors. Vectors!
01/12/2009 at 12:12 Richard Clayton says:
@SpaceWalk:
From IMDB:
The wire-frame computer graphics on the display screens in the glider were not actually computer graphics. (Computers capable of 3D wire-frame imaging were way too expensive when this was made.) To generate the “wire-frame” images, they built a model of the city, painted it black, attached bright white tape to the model buildings in an orderly grid, and moved a camera through the model city!
01/12/2009 at 01:20 Blue Cheese Rocket says:
Electric Dreams that’s wot I want to say.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek08KvgqFGM
01/12/2009 at 01:29 the_magma says:
containing obvious flaws, but still the ultimate in-film software scene: the esper photo analysis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkcU0gwZUdg
01/12/2009 at 01:30 devlocke says:
Is it possible the software was able to look at reflections from other surfaces in the picture and piece together what the front of the head looks like? I don’t recall the scene, but if it were a photo of the back of someone’s head in front of a window or in a bathroom with shiny tile all over the place or something, I could sort of kinda see how that could work.
01/12/2009 at 01:31 devlocke says:
All this time, I assumed people who had reply-fails were just incompetent and it would never happen to me. That was directed at Railick,
01/12/2009 at 01:31 JuJuCam says:
I doubt anyone else would remember this, but Seaquest DSV made efforts to realistically depict a future undersea research vessel but often fell short in computing contexts.
My favourite was the underwater hackers episode called Photon Bullet featuring among other things, rerouting money that was being transferred via network pipes (as if it were a train full of gold you could hijack), the main competitive multiplayer game being some sort of 3d spacial awareness related puzzle game, an avatar oriented voicechat (ok, so that’s not so unrealistic, but it’s still amusing), and Seth Green.
01/12/2009 at 01:43 Oak says:
Also they had a talking dolphin.
01/12/2009 at 13:39 Jimmy says:
Yep, I linked to that episode earlier in the thread.
01/12/2009 at 02:09 Kazy says:
I believe she also runs an actual OpenSSH exploit to break into a server or something in that scene. Pretty rad.
01/12/2009 at 02:29 Kazy says:
OK why is it impossible to reply on this site?
Also wanted to point out that, while the interface Tony Stark uses in Iron Man to design his suit is hilariously wizzbang and flash, the actual process he goes through is relatively hackerish and true to life. That is, he has to fail his tests a whole bunch of times before he gets anything usable. I personally found the movie kind of inspiring in that regard.
01/12/2009 at 02:09 Rufust Firefly says:
I always loved the command-line driven hacker in Mission: Impossible, where he had to type in JAM SIGNAL and OPEN DOOR and the like.
In the future of computing, all hackers will program their custom apps like an Infocom parser.
01/12/2009 at 02:38 the wiseass says:
‘ELLO COMPUTAR!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh3C0vyyttk
01/12/2009 at 02:44 wcaypahwat says:
Las Vegas always had some ridiculously silly computer interaction.
What really bugs me is how everyone on tv owns a macbook with a conveniently placed sticker over the apple logo.
01/12/2009 at 02:50 vagabond says:
I haven’t watched it in many years, but Sneakers always struck me as having some pretty realistic tech stuff going on, although I don’t know how much you’d classify as “computer” stuff as opposed to “electronics” stuff. It’s also probably getting laughably old as tech goes by now.
Possibly the worst serial offender for crimes against realistic computing is NCIS.
I recall one episode in particular where the NCIS computer system is being hacked into and Abby is struggling to stop the hacker, but isn’t typing fast enough to compete, so McGee sits down next to her and starts typing _on the same keyboard as her_ allowing them to type fast enough to win.
The biggest problem with the depiction of computing in TV/movies is that doing stuff on a computer usually isn’t very interesting and certainly isn’t dramatic or exciting, and can never be made to be dramatic or exciting.
01/12/2009 at 02:56 Concept says:
The one that makes me shriek bloody murder is Spooks.
They use crappy Flash based stuff, with the default glow themes. And its always a really stupid system, like they’ll have one search box for the entire Mi5 Mainframe.
01/12/2009 at 03:19 Blather Blob says:
I’ve always wondered who did the computer screens for Alias (at least the first season, I stopped watching after that… and realised I’d made the right choice when I was flipping by a couple years later and they were running down a subway tunnel shooting zombies). Those always seemed pretty realistic, like something a programmer would throw together in X11′s Motif or something equally ugly whenever a progress bar was called for.
I’ve noticed lots of shows and movies using linux’s KDE or other alternative OSes whenever they want a non-windows/non-mac interface shown. Or maybe they just google for desktop screenshots, at least some of the time.
And since I know replying isn’t going to work:
@St4ud3: I once saw a bit of an episode of Numbers where they were trying to claim a Van Eck phreaking device is something which eavesdrops on the photons from a computer monitor. So it’s a video camera, then?
01/12/2009 at 03:38 malkav11 says:
I do notice this sort of thing an awful lot. But then, I would, spending all my time on computers. I’m pretty sure I’d have a similar reaction to most other sorts of on-screen activity if I knew enough about the appropriate stuff.
01/12/2009 at 04:12 Eschaton says:
Is it bad that despite being half the age necessary to have played such games in their prime, that I actually know what you are talking about?
01/12/2009 at 04:14 Eschaton says:
Bah! That was supposed to be in reply to Rufust Firefly and his Infocom reference.
01/12/2009 at 06:49 Dave L. says:
The late and lamented Middleman TV show often referenced ‘MyFaceinaTube.com’ as their all purpose social networking, video sharing, search engine website.
01/12/2009 at 15:15 user@example.com says:
Stephen Fry’s millionth Twitter follower caused him to predict the future of social networking: TwitOnMyFace.
02/12/2009 at 11:54 Richeh says:
And tell me that you love me?
01/12/2009 at 06:54 c-Row says:
Not the interface itself, but there was a German direct-to-TV production where the bad guys shoot some lab computer’s screen, and the scientist go all “Oh my God, all our files are lost!” afterwards. And no, it was no iMac. That scene generated actual physical hurt in my head.
01/12/2009 at 07:14 BonusWavePilot says:
Though the exploit it finds was from a 2001, so if the Agents are this slack with their security upgrades they had it coming, really.
01/12/2009 at 07:15 BonusWavePilot says:
err, that was supposed to be a reply to the first comment about nmap appearing in the Matrix Reloaded.
01/12/2009 at 08:38 AukonDK says:
The movie Antitrust had all their computer interfaces running Gnome (presumably on Linux), plenty of command line hackery there. (Why a ultra-evil version of M$ would be running a free OS on their machines I don’t know :p)
In one episode of Life, our main character pours a drink on a keyboard which breaks the computer (complete with sparks!)… until a techy comes along and just tips the keyboard to pour the liquid off and it works perfectly! So much wrong with that scene!
Similar but perhaps a bit better, final episode of Primeval season 2(?) had the hero breaking a keyboard, forcing the baddie to use a PDA which the hero knew had been compromised.
01/12/2009 at 09:48 Lurch Kimded says:
My favourite has to be from the superbly over the top and utterly ridiculous “Red Wolf” (aka “Hu meng wei long”) where the bad guys hack into the ships captains safe (where some uranium is being stored) by scrolling through a Microsoft Word for Mac document, they dont even hide the title bar :)
01/12/2009 at 10:10 Chaz says:
The X-Files magic computers always stick in my mind. No matter how pixelated a CCTV image or photograph was, they could get one of their computer whiz kids to do a quick tapitty tap, and layers of chunky pixel coating would just fall away before your eyes leaving a perfectly clear image underneath.
01/12/2009 at 10:24 Schmung says:
They always get loading bars wrong in films and telly. For starters they’re accurate and tick along at a predictable rate. Small thing, but very annoying.
Also – ever film and telly show to ever feature a terribly overdone and flashy mail client. hnnggghh. I’ve been lead to believe that ‘You’ve got Mail’ contains a particularly heinous example, but I can’t bring myself to watch it and prove my own point.
02/12/2009 at 09:12 Agrajag says:
No they don’t. They are all MS bars – the last 2 seconds last forever. Diffusing, copying the last of the file while being shot at and so on stretches the time.
01/12/2009 at 10:24 Chaz says:
The other one that sticks in my mind is the finger print matcher from the CSI programs. Where by pictures of finger prints and their corresponding mug shots flash by at a dizzying speed, accompanied by a progress bar below. When the bar reaches the end we get a fancy animation of the target print being matched up to the suspect print, and then “Match Found” flashing up on screen in a big box.
The real process of course would probably invole lots of cups of tea and plenty of dull, painstaking research.
01/12/2009 at 10:25 Schadenfreude says:
Ah that computer from Bones. It’s not even the 3d-o-vision that gets me but the way Angela can do everything in about three key-strokes.
“The body was run over by a car crushing its knees and skull!”
*clickety clack*
*fully rendered 3d animation of a skeleton getting run over by a car in the exact manner described only moments before; conveniently enough by the same model of car that will inevitably have been the murder weapon*
They keep saying she’s ‘just an artist’ but this is a woman who managed to take a body which had been crushed inside of a car that had been compacted into a cube and in a very short space of time simulate the entire process in reverse generating a virtual skeleton which was so accurate they could identify the murder weapon. She’s not just an artist, she is in fact the most intelligent person in the world and if there isn’t some kind of show finale where it turns out she’s a supervillian bent on taking over the world I’ll be most disappointed.
01/12/2009 at 10:33 Chaz says:
Oh yes and “The Net” with Sandra Bullock, I feel deserves a special mention for being utterly ridiculous.
01/12/2009 at 10:47 Kommissar Nicko says:
NO HOW COULD YOU BEAT ME TO IT?!
01/12/2009 at 10:46 Paul says:
I’ve been a fan of Mr Coleran for quite some time – nice to see him crop up on here – he’s a big influence on our visual design.
01/12/2009 at 10:46 Kommissar Nicko says:
Nobody remembers The Net with Sandra Bullock? That movie is almost completely computerized nonsense.
01/12/2009 at 11:24 Sparvy says:
I can’t find any good videos now but the two scenes that stand out are the from transformers where that girl runs away to her hacker buddy that lives with his mom, and when they put the secret alien codes in this huge purple 3D thing comes out and blocks of 3D-generated code starts flying around.
Or that part in Enemy of the State where they take a surveillance video and in seconds recreates the whole scene in 3D so that they can spin the camera around and see that he had something square and black in his plastic bag.
01/12/2009 at 11:42 Redd says:
There’s a lot of wholesale cut and pasting of Wikipedia entries into stuff at the moment, so if you’re a subtle and dedicated enough wikivandal with a sprinkling of luck and a sharp eye you might catch some of your trolling making it to the silver screen.
01/12/2009 at 11:54 brkl says:
It’s the several times mentioned image enhancing that gets me too. I can take a stupid interface and related stuff, but the image enhancing betrays the fact that for most people a computer has the same role as, say, a witch’s cauldron or crystal ball.
01/12/2009 at 11:54 Carra says:
I remember a brilliant scene from Jurassic Park.
A pc was locked and everytime you missguessed the password you’d get an annoying “You didn’t say the magic word”.
Brilliant.
01/12/2009 at 12:15 si says:
Here is my take on it. from a while ago
http://studiochipfork.com/hyper/hyper2.htm
01/12/2009 at 13:36 Jimmy says:
I had linked to that episode earlier in the thread.
01/12/2009 at 13:40 Jimmy says:
reply fail..
01/12/2009 at 13:43 Yargh says:
I’m surprised no one has mentioned 24 yet…
01/12/2009 at 14:20 sonofsanta says:
I’ve always joked that I wanted to be the guy who designed fake operating systems for Hollywood. I never realised the job actually existed.
Most 90s films had a ridiculous sequence of hacking into the FBI/CIA/etc. by going to their public website, clicking the big obvious button and then randomly guessing at passwords – this usually in giant letters over an enormous version of the agency badge. Who needs VPN’s, eh?
I’d have to second the vote for Indepence Day myself though – good job those pesky aliens are using x86 based binary code as well!
01/12/2009 at 15:00 Subject 706 says:
Yeah. Not only do the aliens for some improbable reason use binary code, the virus is also magically attuned to their OS. You’d think they’d be using a firewall?
Good thing the earth always gets invaded by the retarded technologically superior aliens.
01/12/2009 at 15:12 Coleran says:
Nice to see this discussion and thanks for some of the good notes.
As good as some stuff looks (even if unrealistic) and as crap as people might think it looks sometimes, screens in film and tv have only one master. Tell the story. You get the script and you have to tell the story in any way you can and you have to do it fast and clearly. It is clearly a case of ‘enhanced visual displays’ as TV Tropes refer them. Looking at a dead screen whilst waiting for something to happen, working on your own machine or in the office might be realistic but has a tendency to kill the scene, on screen in a film or tv. It is all about visual, for better or for worse.
Whether god or bad, go easy on some of the guys who do this stuff. They have to turn around alot of work, with tiny budgets (not as lucrative as some people think) and they have to do it every week. They are also going against there better nature. They know it isn’t right. They know it could be better but the demands of the script and the people they work with dictate everything. They do a superb job under the circumstances.
There are some stinkers though.
I think my favorite, bad screen has to be the 3D email, zipping off into cyberspace in Mission Impossible 1. It was actually a friend of mine who did it and you have no idea how much he fought against that one.
01/12/2009 at 15:55 Max says:
As far as I know, the second Matrix movie is the only one to portray hacking realistically. Which is kind of ironic.
On the other end of the spectrum there’s “Hackers” – where hacking involves looking at a screensaver of shiny 3D symbols flying towards the screen.
01/12/2009 at 19:28 Jacob says:
I like the part in the new Bond films where Bond is asked to spell out a name over the phone. Instead of transcribing it, the computer just uses voice recognition. This is all well and good, except the name he has to spell has “ee” in it. So, the sequence goes something like this:
Bond: L
Computer: *displays L
Bond: Double…
Computer: *displays W
Bond: E
Computer: *Deletes the W and replaces it with “EE”
Maybe this is possible, but to me it always seemed ridiculous, that the computer would A). Anticipate that “Double” will be followed by “U” and that B). undo that anticipation and recognize “Double E” as “ee”
01/12/2009 at 19:40 Railick says:
If you’ve ever used a cell phone to text message with that T-9 thing it wouldn’t seem so impossible. It can anticipate entire words and when you give it the next letter it will redo the whole thing to narrow it down to what you were actaully trying to type. Incase you don’t know the T-9 thing (I think that is what it is called) allows you to type a lot faster once you get used to it. If you wanted to type Cat instead of type 2 2 2 2 8, you’d just type 2 2 8 and it would figure out you meant cat based on all the things you could be typing it. Of course it doesn’t always work but it blows my mind how often and well it DOES work.
02/12/2009 at 22:07 Wisq says:
I always loved the scene in one of the episodes of Nikita (the TV series) in which the titular character was talked through remotely killing a process that was guiding airplanes to crash into each other, using Unix “ps” and “kill” commands.
Sure, the “kill” command took too long to execute in order to create a dramatic pause, but it was still a big break from the usual “Movie OS” crap.
The CSI (etc.) shenanigans regarding infinite zooming in on terrible images is perhaps best summed up by this image.
03/12/2009 at 11:32 zipdrive says:
I’ve recently watched Hardwired which, in addition to claiming that when a company got direct access to your brain via chip all it would to is send ads, it also had an extreme dose of “hacker types really fast to make X, Y or Z happen”.
03/12/2009 at 13:36 Masked Dave says:
24
All that typing! Also a computer system that can get you any information instantly. So what’s the point of having the room full of analysts? It seems like CTU can be run by 5 people alone.
04/12/2009 at 10:26 mootpoint says:
And now the main stream flows by you:
Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them
06/12/2009 at 13:17 KindredPhantom says:
Whilst watching the latest episodes of Dollhouse i could not help but to think back to this thread.
06/12/2009 at 19:14 Combaticus says:
For me it’s not the visuals so much—it’s THE SOUNDS!
11/12/2009 at 00:00 Stephen says:
Actually, the computer that saves the world is a Powerbook 1400 so the aliens seem to be using early PPC code, which is even rarer on Earth.
11/02/2010 at 06:22 Flat Eric says:
Never mind firewalls, in Independence Day the whole early plot hinges on aliens not having invented clocks, as they depend on a broadcast counting-down signal thing to ensure they all attack at the same time.
I haven’t read all the comments, but if no one mention’s Scotty’s use of a PC to ‘design’ transparent aluminium (with a few rapid key-strokes, natch) in Star Trek: The Voyage Home, then you’re all just too young to know.
11/02/2010 at 06:44 G Morgan says:
I’m not certain “Hackers” deserves to be panned here The computer stuff in there is clearly meant to be stylistic instead of representative. It’s meant to evoke.
My own favorite “They got it right!” moment was in the first season of Millennium, circa 1998, when the protagonist Frank Black searches the internet for references to the word Gehenna. Not only do they actually show him typing in a real browser, the results page is what you would have actually seen in 1998, including Vampire: the Masquerade references. Excellent.
19/11/2010 at 02:35 Martin Lapietra says:
Even at a generous estimate — say, for vertical length, the distance from lowest to highest human habitation, and for area every square kilomere inhabited by at least one human