The Hardest Special Effect to Get Right
November 5th, 2006What do you suppose is the hardest thing to reproduce on the big screen or in a TV show? Is it space scenes? I doubt it. They look pretty good to me for the most part except for the sound and the fact that you can’t really see a laser unless it is hitting something (think laser pointers… all you see is a dot). Is it water? Well, it’s challenging, but it usually looks believable. No, I’d have to say that, based solely on the observation of the final product, it would have to be: the personal computer.
You would think that it wouldn’t be too hard to make a computer look and act like a computer on screen. I don’t know about you, but when I bring up a webpage my computer doesn’t make any high-pitched jittery noises. Almost every show I see has the computer make a weird chirping noise every time the screen’s contents change. I think the sound guy just gets jealous or something that he has nothing to do when the computer screen is the only thing in the frame. He looks at it and thinks, “I could make this part so much cooler with this super high-speed cricket noise every time the screen’s contents change!”
My number two complaint is computer technology that doesn’t exists. The worst offender for this sort of thing is the classic blowing up and “enhancement” of a digital image. It gets blown up, the pixels get huge, and then someone says “let me enhance it” or something similar, and the picture magically becomes so clear that what was a giant 4 inch by 4 inch single colored block turns into a license plate with letters that are an eighth of an inch high and perfectly legible. It just creates this detail data out of nowhere. It makes no sense. It happens at least once in almost every crime show.
When will Hollywood realize that everyone uses computers every day and we can see that the computers in their shows don’t act anything like the computers on our desks. It really makes it hard to stay focused and suspend my disbelief when the computers are such horrible actors.
November 6th, 2006 at 10:51 am
I 100% agree that the image enhancement effect is so bogus it actually takes away from the show/movie. Most times because of the image enhancement there is a major clue revelaed or the story line changes based upon the cleaned up image. Whats worse is that they usually grab the image or video stream from crappy black and white security cameras. I was talking about this very thing with a coworker and he said the worst thing he ever saw was on CSI. I guess they had a frame from a security camera that they blew up and enhanced enough that they could make out the detailed face of somebody from the reflection off someone’s sunglasses!! Such crap! I hate when they do this and I wish they would do the detective work some other way.
November 6th, 2006 at 4:09 pm
CSI is so full of crap! I throw up in my mouth every time I see that magical “enhancement” feature in their “magical†computers. There is probably a big red “enhancement” button on the keyboard. I bet that if you look real closely at the button it is really a piece of cardboard painted red with the word “enhancement†written on it in sharpy.