Comments on: What You Lookin’ At?

By: jsp

jsp — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 18:40:23 +0000

Yeah, and that same playbook says “always use a dot matrix printer noise, regardless of whether the printer on-screen is an inkjet, laser, or thermal…but not for too long, as all movie printers take just 2-3 seconds to produce a page.”

By: awarren

awarren — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 18:37:22 +0000

One of my favorite movie sound editing quirks is how nearly all movie computers, from mainframes to PCs, usually make the sound of an Apple II’s disk drive reading a disk. Even in scenes where there’s no diskette! There must be some sound playbook that says “need the audience to know the computer is working? play that Apple disk drive noise from 1984.”

By: jsp

jsp — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:20:33 +0000

Oh, how I’d love to actually have movie-style computers. Not the hideously ugly/simple e-mail ones with lots of 3-D envelopes, mind you, but the amazing imaging processing ones, where you can somehow take a crappy 320×240 b&w image, and — mere seconds after the hero says “Enhance!” — zoom way in to see the crisp edge of the last stamp in the bad guy’s passport, which he’s conveniently holding half-open.

Sure, it’s a trifle obvious and micro-managing, the shouted “Enhance!” command. But when you think about it, it’s really quite succinct when compared to the more accurate “Put in data that was never there!”

By: The something Mr. Pech

The something Mr. Pech — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:10:14 +0000

I think it’s customary to display the missile trajectories superimposed on a world map along with the locations of the fighter jets and major naval battle groups. Then when the hero is almost about to be captured by the bad guys you switch to the impossible resolution satellite photos to watch horrified in real time as the evil dudes close in. Also an option is the video phone call with some foreign leader while they give you some key piece of information.

Anyway after that you trick the computer into playing tic-tac-toe with itself and thereby save the world.