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.
The late and lamented Middleman TV show often referenced ‘MyFaceinaTube.com’ as their all purpose social networking, video sharing, search engine website.
Stephen Fry’s millionth Twitter follower caused him to predict the future of social networking: TwitOnMyFace.
And tell me that you love me?
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.
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.
err, that was supposed to be a reply to the first comment about nmap appearing in the Matrix Reloaded.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh yes and “The Net” with Sandra Bullock, I feel deserves a special mention for being utterly ridiculous.
NO HOW COULD YOU BEAT ME TO IT?!
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.
Nobody remembers The Net with Sandra Bullock? That movie is almost completely computerized nonsense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here is my take on it. from a while ago
http://studiochipfork.com/hyper/hyper2.htm
I had linked to that episode earlier in the thread.
reply fail..
I’m surprised no one has mentioned 24 yet…
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!
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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”.
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.
And now the main stream flows by you:
Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them
Whilst watching the latest episodes of Dollhouse i could not help but to think back to this thread.
For me it’s not the visuals so much—it’s THE SOUNDS!
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.