Back to the Future, the enchantment under the sea dance, 1955. Marty is playing a Gibson 335 which was first made in 1958
Back to the Future, the enchantment under the sea dance, 1955. Marty is playing a Gibson 335 which was first made in 1958
You could write a book of BTTF niggles.
The big one is in BTTF2 when old Biff goes back from 2015 to 1955 to give the sports almanac to his younger self, why does he not return to an alternate 2015 rather than the one he left?
classic car chase scene in Bullitt between Steve McQueen in a Ford Mustang and two assassins in a Dodge Charger where they repeatedly overtake the same VW Beetle (guess the driver might have been lost)
It belonged to one of the film crew, iirc.
Steve McQueen's son did a tribute remake of the bullitt chase with Gas Monkey Garage recently. They even had the beetle being overtaken several times 😁
Volcano films, like the Tommy Lee Jones one that just finished. Very rarely do you find a lava flow that you cannot out walk to escape from (note lava, not pyroclastic flow) Concrete blocks will not divert a lava flow.
My pet bug-bear: orange and teal colour pallet.
It compliments skin tone - so for as long as the humans in films have skin on them the sets are going to be orange and teal 🙂
Jets making attack on vital installation, after many explosions, the pilots talk to each other explaining they are all out of ordnance, save one who has one bomb/missile left. Cut to outside shot of jets showing flight of jets with pylons fully loaded with ordnance.
We built the steel frame for the Dragon Casino, including the little hump back bridge indoors over the lizards where he fights on the way out.
Some epic stuff being done in there for the latest one, but the majority is on the backlot and other stages
i was on that stage when they were striking the set (sat in on of the bond DB5’s as i was there on a job for EON) a friend is back on the current Bond, it’s nice to go and see but wouldn’t want to be on a long production, too many nightmare stories...
on the subject of cars....
Where a driver is completing a long journey, the car pulls into the driveway...with plumes of water vapour pouring out of a stone-cold exhaust pipe.
Guy is stalking deer in Scotland,
Arrested on his return for using a bow in UK.
Also light one candle and it's like the sun came up.
wouldn’t want to be on a long production, too many nightmare stories…
Longer the better , it all helps pay the bills 😉
Explosions where they get blown backwards a distance, then dust themselves down, if the blast wave has enough energy to do that then you're dead already.
Also in Bullitt, the mustang which has a broken track rod end, which is magically repaired 50yards later.
Explosions where they get blown backwards a distance, then dust themselves down, if the blast wave has enough energy to do that then you’re dead already.
Don't ever watch the Ateam on Acid Windtalkers
It compliments skin tone – so for as long as the humans in films have skin on them the sets are going to be orange and teal
No. It’s all done in the grade with luts plus it’s easy to track a mask on a face so nothing to do with the human face but more to do with setting a mood/feel or even a historical time.
They even tracked a nose to recolour, Nicole Kidman had a prosthetic nose in The Hours and it didn’t always match her skin tone so all done in post.
Indiana Jones, the staff for the emulet to locate the ark is desciby as being '6 kadam high, 72 inches but take back one kadam to honour the Hebrew god whose ark this is' Making it 5 ft. It's then about 2 ft taller than Harrison ford in the map room. Grrrrrrrrrrr.
I’m glad someone mentioned Dunkirk. They lost me when the guys were leaving Weymouth and the Jurassic Skyline tower was clearly visible in the background of some shots. It was built in 2012.
Fist fights where nobody puts up any defence. Every shot lands with a sort of slapping noise but without breaking either the nose of the person being hit or the knuckles of the person doing the hitting.
Helicopters in films where the pilot is injured or shot dead, and the instruments start talking “head up, terrain..terrain..danger, terrain..”
#missionimpossiblefallout
(and yes, Toms already done the “running like a chicken” routine)
🤷♂️
The bass drop sound that seems to be essential for all films these days
OOOOOooooommmmmm...
Any film with weapons in it: there will always be something that makes me shout at the telly.
John Wick 3. Pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff.
Always when they stealthily plant explosives but it has a flashing LED/and/or audible beep on it.
The Alcatraz time travel series they cancelled at the end of S1 had a final car chase that was an homage to Bullit but with a modern Mstang. They did overtake the same car @ few times.
In Goldeneye: the giant satellite dish under the lake in Cuba.
That's a multi-year construction, hundreds of millions of ££, and we've had the CIA character saying "you can't light a cigar in Cuba without us knowing about it"
So how did he build a massive dish and then flood it and WHERE THE **** DOES ALL THE WATER GO? The dish rises up, the water goes down through the hatch in the bottom. Next minute, James Bond is dropping through the same hatch into a nice neat computer room. Where's the water?!
Sorry, there are numerous little details in most films that annoy me but that is unforgivable.
Another vote for the gunshots one. Bad guy blazes away on full auto and there's a cloud of ricochets, sparks etc around the good guy who remains unharmed. Good guy pulls out a pistol - one pop and the bad guy falls dead (uually from a distance of about 200m).
Helicopters in films where the pilot is injured or shot dead, and the instruments start talking “head up, terrain..terrain..danger, terrain..”
Out of interest what is wrong with that? I've certainly been in a light aircraft that did that. Pilot wasn't shot, but we did land on a private strip that wasn't on the map so got terrain warnings all the way in.
All those shooting scenes where characters are protected from the bullets by hiding behind a car... Good luck with that in real life! 😉
It compliments skin tone – so for as long as the humans in films have skin on them the sets are going to be orange and teal
If your cast is oompa lumpas maybe, or you're filming TOWIE.
I know exactly WHY they do it, it's just really tedious, artificial and incredibly overused.
All those shooting scenes where characters are protected from the bullets by hiding behind a car… Good luck with that in real life! 😉
Here you go (although it does also expose the movie lie of people being able to hit the target with a handgun when stressed 😉
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ENuxT_7SvAE
Database searches for fingerprints or facial recognition etc where the screen flashes an image up of every single record until it finds the one that matches. Like the computer was flicking through an album.
Pretty much any film with a computer hacking scene in it
bikebouy
Subscriber
Noise and explosions in space
Well, both Gravity and Interstellar fixed this gaff and to mighty good effect too…
and then First Man ruined it with Gemini 8 sounding like a turbofan starting up every time something happened to it
All those shooting scenes where characters are protected from the bullets by hiding behind a car… Good luck with that in real life!
I think the point is that the other guy can't aim at you if he can't see you. It's kinda like hiding behind a hedge or bush. It won't stop a bullet, but your chances of being hit are much lower if the other guy can't see you. For example:
Pretty much any film with a computer hacking scene in it
Oh my lordy! How could I have forgotten the one thing that bugs me most in films!
Computer noises! beep bi beep bip beep every single time something appears on screen! Every single sodding film! beep bip bipbi bi beep bippity bip! HAve you EVER seen a computer screen that does this?? I bleeding haven't! Why oh why!?! It's so stupid.
Only exception I know of is those "Unfriended" horror films. They were nonsense, but I loved them purely cos the only thing near to screen beeps was occasional clackety clack of typing.
Pretty much any film with a computer hacking scene in it
Eddie Izzard did a great take on this. "Hacking in to the Pentagon computer... double-click on 'yes'... "
(NSFW warning, contains swears)
DezB
Only exception I know of is those “Unfriended” horror films. They were nonsense, but I loved them purely cos the only thing near to screen beeps was occasional clackety clack of typing.
Matrix Reloaded has a fairly accurate hacking scene. SSH exploit (pause at 00:03) :
More on guns: people using AK 47 or AR 15 and emptying entire magazines into a car or shed for example, only for the goodie to step out and take out the baddie with a snub nose .38 or .22. (or worse... someone takes a round from a AK47 in the leg for example and walks away, that is a big fn calibre and will shatter bones!)
Not only from a distance are these things woefully in accurate but there are plenty of real life reports of people being shot multiple time with .38 or even bigger and managing to flee the scene.
+1 for car chase downshifts, ending phonecalls without saying goodbye or similar, blip blip car alarms.
Short barrels generally means a lot of power loss and much worse accuracy. There are tales* of wet army greatcoats being able to stop the 9mm rounds from a Sterling SMG. I'm not sure I would want to try it, but you get the idea.
One thing that really started to annoy me was the way that travelling is depicted in most Hollywood films' cutaway scenes. It's always in one direction... Cars , trains, you name it, all seem to go left to right.
Matrix Reloaded
Trust the Matrix sequel to provide the gritty realism we so desire. Bip bip bippity sqwauk
Pretty much any film with a computer hacking scene in it
Cue scene of character stating intently at the screen while a reflection of lines of scrolling code can be seen in their glasses. They're always wearing glasses.
More on guns
Do you realise how you "I know more about real gunz than everybody else" people come across?
I'll give you a clue. One of the earliest internet memes, before memes was even a word. You're fat, you're hairy, you're lying on a bed carressing your big rifle*.
*I misremembered - it's a lovely pistol resting on your hairy thigh.
a Sterling SMG
The most inaccurate firearm in the entire Galaxy.......
Computers that beeb and burble: This dates from the days of teletypes, I think, where they made noises (remember the football results one?). A combination of this and low-speed serial transmission that you could hear via short wave radio.
Flashing lights: This goes back all the way to ENIAC I think, where the output from its programs was displayed on a panel with rows of lights that lit up to display numbers in binary. It amuses me that in Alien which is otherwise a great looking film despite its age still their ship computer has a display like this 🙂 Of course entirely understandable; there's no excuse these days.
I think there are a few reasons why computer screen still show rubbish even in an era where everyone uses computers.
1) TV shows still make money with product placement, so they won't show someone using actual Google for free. If Google haven't paid up they'll have a mock-up which looks just like Google but isn't.
2) Movies and TV obviously can't be fully realistic - they have to convey plot points quickly and economically without labouring it via the dialogue, and also they need to show the actor's faces at tense times and so on. So you get (for example) a spaceship scene which is a long shot of the bridge with the crew shitting themselves and the computer is reading out status messages like 'shields at 15%' or similar. If that was a close-up of a computer screen it'd be rubbish to watch. So in real life, you'd input a picture into a facial recognition database and it would say 'thanks for your submission we will notify you when potential matches are found' via a boring text interface and it'd eventually give a load of dodgy looking results which you'd have to sift through. If you did this in a typical TV show it'd totally kill the pace and you'd have to create a scene just to move the plot on. If you just show faces flashing up on a screen then going 'beep beep match found' then in a second you know what's happened, and it hasn't cost the company any money or time.
But this raises a wider point about the meta-language we use in storytelling generally, both visually and in books. It's built from cultural references, shared history and established conventions. If someone in a conversation makes a reference to tumbleweed in the Anglophone world we all know what it means despite most of us not having ever seen a real tumbleweed. Another similar one is the call of (I think) a Red-Tailed Hawk signifying wilderness and desperation, although this is pretty hackneyed now. But there are loads more. When a TV show cuts to a new scene in a different building they *always* show the exterior of the building first so you know what's happening.
But they do similar things with the actual plot as well not just visuals. They build the story in a way we're used to it being built. This is how we are able to half-watch a typical show whilst doing something else and still follow it - we are able to pick out the important bits - e.g. we know when they are doing a recap scene and we will look up from STW for it.
If you watch foreign TV, the conventions, references and tropes are different, which is why it can be fascinating. Once you start looking out for all these tricks and cues you'll see them all over the place. The burbling computer or the status bar (like the virus uploading one), the screeching of tyres to show urgency, the pointing of guns at faces (despite them never going to be fired) and so on are all visual cues. Other things like the maverick cop, the geeky but brilliant young female recruit, the nerd, the old cop a week from retirement, the shouty black police chief, they are all there deliberately to make everything familiar so we can piece the story together without really having to concentrate much.
I love this topic!
Pretty much any film with a computer
hackingscene in it
they are all there deliberately to make everything familiar so we can piece the story together without really having to concentrate much.
No, they are all there so lazy scriptwriters can piece a story together without really having to concentrate much.
