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Movie and TV GUIs: Cracking the Code
rjmarvin writes "We've all seen the code displayed in hacking scenes from movies and TV, but now a new industry is growing around custom-building realistic software and dummy code. Twisted Media, a Chicago-based design team, started doing fake computer graphics back in 2007 for the TNT show Leverage, and is now working on three prime-time shows on top of films like Gravity and the upcoming Divergent. They design and create realistic interfaces and codebases for futuristic software. British computer scientist John Graham-Cumming has drawn attention to entertainment background code by explaining what the displayed code actually does on his blog, but now that the public is more aware, studios are paying for fake code that's actually convincing."
Now it doesn't even have to compile!!!
End of discussion. ++ATH0
Maybe they'll explain to TV producers that facial recognition software doesn't work by showing each face it's checking. Yet somehow get through ginormous databases in minutes.
Godzilla 2000 used the whats new in mame txt file on a system shown at high speed maybe they can just take txt files from anywhere and show them at speed that needs freeze frames to read them.
A brilliant combination of real software and fake GUIs on the same screen - they obviously had a product placement deal with Microsoft, and in one scene they literally dragged a file from SkyDrive into the usual bleeping "FBI Database Lookup" window. I wish I had a .gif of that...
Maybe they'll explain to TV producers that facial recognition software doesn't work by showing each face it's checking.
I always thought of it more as a throbber, the same as if the app were to display Lindsay Lohan doesn't change facial expressions during recognition.
Feb. 27th, Revolution had code scrolling on the screen (yes they were debugging at light speed), but they stopped at a C function that did actually have a runtime bug that matched the story line (an unused/released C malloc). The only thing that spoiled it was that the same statement was missing a semi-colon, so the code wouldn't have actually compiled in the first place.
Oh well...it was nice to see some code that did actually match what the characters were babbling about...even if there were other things that they did that didn't make any sense what-so-ever to someone who actually understood what they were seeing on the computer screen.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
They moved to Portland so it was cool to see the city in the background, but Sophie bacame a pycho stalker and the Microsoft product placemnt was hard to ignore. I loved the 3D rendered blueprints of buildings they are able to magically pull up...like most of them arent still on blue wide format paper.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Enjoy the pain my friends.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Fallout New Vegas has a man-portable 25mm automatic grenade launcher. It has an on-screen display scrolling what looks like code while the weapon is firing.
The code? It's a piece of BASH scripting. With a crippling syntax error ("if" without closing "fi").
If this was the height of alternate-history pre-war embedded software technology, I can understand why derelict car engines can explode in a nuclear explosion.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
The creators of CSI are hands-down either the most tech-illiterate people on the planet, or the best Trolls in the industry. I can't tell which it is.
Here's a real gem:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
It fascinates me to this day that the HAL system in 2001 Space Oddesy was designed that way also. And Collosus - Forbin Project was REAL computers supposedly running REAL programs.
Hard for me to watch any "popular culture" video of any kind with any kind of technology content. So much of it is just SO bad!
I have been using the audio 'rif' from Collosus (-1sp) for years as my default system "beep".
That seems highly unlikely.
Thank you Dave Raggett
An animator for the TV show Archer popped into Reddit's Linux section to point out an in-joke he'd placed in some code on an extra monitor in a scene. He says he's added many more gags like this.
Clearly another successful spinoff of the affordable health obamacare codebase reorganization effort? The feedback effect is sure to ensue. Game of Thrones based control rooms?
Nothing beats the old series' printout computers. Those in Voyage to The Bottom of The Sea, or Time Tunnel, for example. And C***L code on them. Or, mercifully, just numbers.
If I remember correctly, the second matrix movie showed a closeup of a terminal where someone was running nmap with sensical command line arguments. No, it didn't make it any better.
wonderful http://fakeui.tumblr.com/
I wish I could get paid to not program.
Or at least have that as my job description. I already do that at my current job, but it's not officially my job description.
Most tech movies I have seen always depict brief episodes where I could actually see code on some computer screen. Nothing there to influence how I actually perceive the movie. What bothers me most, is when the actors actually talk about something computer-related (hacking, firewall, backdoor, trojan)... THAT is one huge mess that needs some fixing...
My family members who are in the health sector could argue the same about hospital/emergency room fiction -- except maybe for House... but that's a different story.
Stay tuned while someone is breaking the firewall.
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I know this!
... because I'm never sure if I'm about to be directed to something written at a high school quality.
Protip for "tech journalists": one does not "speak to" when "speaking of" a thing.
Apple II disassembly used to be a go-to for this kind of thing.
If they could all just stick to NMAP, but it doesn't have a "Face for TV". So they do what I saw on NCIS-LA last week: they pull out what appears to be the oldest crap known to mankind, and instead of proper IP addresses, they shift decimals around so instead of octets, they have 3 digits, then 4, then 2, and then truncate the rest, and it still reads 1921.68.41.218 which looks like they just shuffled the decimal for a local lan. And then add very basic connect/disconnect text. They could have done a fake of LOIC and it would have looked like 'Face for TV' and there would be no bullshit.
Love 'em or hate 'em, but the ship display screens in 2001 were quite original. It was early foreshadowing by a detailed director, telling a future of very lazy ones to come after.
I have always found it funny that Apple gives away all these Macs to television shows and movie production, but 9 times out of 10 when they show the screen it is something completely made up and looks nothing like OS X.
Anyway, I watch out for these things very carefully and I have to lend some credit to Revolution. In two different episodes a computer booted into what was very clearly a korn shell. I was a bit impressed. They also show a lot of code on that show, but it is too briefly shown and obfuscated to make out what it is. Probably Javascript : p I can only imagine the programming jokes that are hidden within.
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It's been a while since I watched it, but I recall that one of the DVD extras for the first "Iron Man" movie is on the GUI design of the HUDs for the suits. The designers apparently thought quite a bit about the specific HCI issues that might arise for such a usage situation (essentially like a fighter plane, but with more stuff), and so there are nested menus that radiate out from the lower left when the user's attention focuses on that part of the display, without obscuring the full field of view, etc.
The different GUI colour schemes used between the various suits was also considered, although narrative clarity and style were (sensibly) prioritized above functionality in this respect, I think.
Also...
Potentially wandering off topic (but sticking with fictional movie aircraft instrumentation):
One of my favourite special effects stories is that back when "Escape from New York" was being made, it was too difficult/expensive to do the computerized 3D wire-frame rendering of Manhattan digitally that was to be displayed on Snake Plissken's glider, so they just made black miniature models of the buildings with gridlines painted on them, and then "flew" a camera over them to get the footage that ended up being displayed on the screen. Back in those days, practical effects based on painted wood were still cheaper than CGI!
See (e.g.) http://www.theefnylapage.com/e...
The same happened way back on the original TRON as well - most of the effects were really just practical effects. There was some CGI in it, but very little (the producers remarked how the show was about computers and such, but they mostly did everything old-school).
Stuff like the glowing highlight lines on the suits and environment were all done by practical effects. In fact, one of them was an error - while they were producing the effect, they accidentally used the boxes of film in the wrong order (the film was specially made by Kodak, and as it was a special order batch, Kodak labelled them in the order of production. Film, it turns out, may have irregularities in its behavior, but these generally change gradually over the film. When the long film strips are cut and reeled, they're numbered so the end of one is the beginning of the other, so if you use it in order, there won't be visual discontinuities caused by the film having slightly different behavior). The end result was one of the buildings throbbed because the film's sensitivities suddenly jerked. It was left in the movie as a happy accident.
And there were other older movies (Robocop?) where they asked about doing things using CGI and doing things practically - the CGI was going to take longer and cost more money so they did things practically (Robocop used matte paintings to enlarge buildings and backgrounds, stop-motion animation and a few other tricks).
Even today, the director often weighs in on doing stuff practically versus CGI. CGI is really good these days, but it still takes time and is harder to work with. And a lot of directors love that practical effects often give a sense of authenticity to the scene because it's being done by real people right there.
The "computer graphics" from the original HHGTTG TV series were hand animated cells. It was the only way for them to animate the guide within budget at the time. From memory they used a blue screen to project the animations onto the guide's screen in post production.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World