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."

Comments

Facial recognition

[jodido]

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.

Re:Facial recognition

[ubrgeek]

It doesn't take minutes. It takes exactly as long as it does for the person at the keyboard to look up, make some remark to the main character and then glance back down when the computer goes "beep."

Re:Facial recognition

[vux984]

Maybe they'll explain to TV producers that facial recognition software doesn't work by showing each face it's checking

It doesn't, and it shouldn't but it could do something along those lines by way of feedback.

I've written a number of systems that have lengthy batch processes that flashes up record information as the system moves through; it doesn't show every record it passes as the screen updates would slow down the system enormously, but it updates a couple times a second and shows for example, every 10000th or so giving them real feedback that something is actually happening without slowing it down at all.

The progress bars that are time 'calibrated' and do not bear any reflection to actual progress are the bane of my existence; where the process hangs at 50% at stops dead, but the time calibrated progress bar just drifts along to 99% and then eventually reports that an error happened.

Those updates that actual data is being processed are good user feedback that its actually doing something.

Of course I don't think facial recogntion is done with a cursor search from the start of a database to finish, the way a system batch processing transactions would be. Instead I imagine they work more like traditional databases, breaking the images down to collections of indexable information and searching the indices; so a record-by-record walk wouldn't be necessary, or perhaps would only be necessary as the final pass through a returned set to further score and sort the results.

In any case, the trouble with TV facial recognition portrayals is less the software itself (because I can handle a dramatization of a computer search like that), I'm more offended by the portrayol of the results. There are no false positives (finding the wrong people) and false negatives, (failing to find people who ARE in the system), or multiple results. No its always either... face goes in and perp comes out... or face goes in and computer declares the person doesn't exist.

Re:Facial recognition

[drinkypoo]

In any case, the trouble with TV facial recognition portrayals is less the software itself (because I can handle a dramatization of a computer search like that), I'm more offended by the portrayol of the results. There are no false positives (finding the wrong people) and false negatives, (failing to find people who ARE in the system), or multiple results. No its always either... face goes in and perp comes out... or face goes in and computer declares the person doesn't exist.

Statistically nobody would even understand what they were on about unless they devoted an entire episode to the concept. Which might be reasonable, of course.

Godzilla 2000 used the whats new in mame txt file

[Joe_Dragon]

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.

Leverage, for one, was a masterpiece

[Lumpio-]

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...

Revolution (the TV Show)

[cmeans]

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.

Re:Revolution (the TV Show)

[DRichardHipp]

The code on-screen was real code from SQLite. The line that contained the memory leak was added by the producers. More information here: http://www.mail-archive.com/sq...

Re:Leverage was good until the last couple seasons

[oneiros27]

Blueprints aren't blue paper.

It's actually a light-sensitive chemical reaction (cyanotype). The back side of blueprints (without the dye) are white. Before it's been exposed to UV and cured, the dye is kinda yellow-ish.

Archer Has Gags in it's Background Code

[terrab0t]

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.