I just watched Jurassic World, in my ongoing and painstaking efforts to see any movie made after the mid 2000s, and man, whatever other complaints one can have about it - and there are plenty, if you wanted to - what actually bugs me is this thing that movies have been doing since the late 90s that just keeps getting worse and worse while remaining just as pointless, and that's the Obnoxiously Overcomplicated Touchscreen For No Reason

i don't have any baseless fantasies that a great amount of thought and care went into the making of this movie. i'm not sitting here going "omg the craftsmanship is simply not very good." I'm saying, why do this, what did it get them. why does every computer interface in every movie have to be an overly busy mess that looks like Osu! on nightmare difficulty plus a forgotten PSP castlevania game that's even more obsessed with the Tree Of Life than most of them are

claire walks up to this thing and - ignoring the fact that there's no diegetic reason for her to be interacting with it at all, since nothing seems to happen, it's just some actor business - it springs to life and all these circles in different colors whoosh around and it looks like she's putting points into her skill tree and unlocking some real cool shit. like, why.

they've been putting these in movies and TV shows for 20 years, but while it looks out of place even in straight sci fi, it's even more incongruous in basically-modern-day settings

in jurassic world, everything is just normal early 21st century building materials. concrete, steel. the cars have internal combustion engines. the doors are normal doors. people have samsung phones with no holographic projectors, that say AT&T and have reception bars. we are not in The Future, it's definitely Right Now, and yet, bizarre touchscreens everywhere with UI that looks like a zachtronics game

we know for a fact that these weird, overly-busy videogame-screens did not appear in reality in the two decades since they started putting them in movies. hell it took until five years ago for obnoxious android-powered card readers to appear on building doors IRL, but even those - as counterproductive and irritating as they are - just have normal Bad Material Design UI, not a bunch of bizarre swirling colored circles and Deus Ex Human Revolution shit. it's immersion breaking, for no reason i can fathom.

again, i have less than zero faith that hollywood cares if their movies make sense, nor do I think 99% of people notice this or would care if it was pointed out. whats bugs me is that this was harder and more expensive to do, and more distracting, than just putting an android tablet in the shot displaying a webpage with a normal control panel mockup, like the ones that exist now, which fit into the actual visual style of the rest of the movie.

i don't get it. it's all so weird and uncalled for. is there a cabal of hollywood FX people who just get off hard to these little sore-thumb control panels? my ongoing personal theory is: yes, this is essentially the case

nobody describes how these things look in a script. i promise you it just says [Claire approaches a COMPUTER TERMINAL and logs in] and then in postproduction, when they fan all the footage out to six or eight effects houses to add in CG, all the "just a computer" shots go to the lowest bidder, which is staffed by artists who don't get a lot of work and spend a lot of time sitting around making these little interfaces in a total vacuum and sharing them on some forum, as graphic artists tend to do.

then they get a work order, and it consists of nothing more than a 9 second video clip and the description a COMPUTER TERMINAL. their pay grade isn't nearly far enough above-the-line to actually be allowed to ask anyone at the studio "hey what the fuck does that mean," nor does anyone in the studio care what the results look like, so they just shrug and shove in one of their little premade doodles, and it's in whatever style is popular on the forum that all the other effects guys are on

and honestly, it wouldn't be so bad if they didn't make one absolutely insurmountable error: we've all experienced Stupid Touchscreen You Have To Interact With To Pay For Parking in the real world. we know that nobody has ever made one that doesn't lag a half-second behind your inputs. all these movie touchscreens are so responsive, they clearly have something better than a single core Cortex-A53 from 2011 inside.

suspension of disbelief SHATTERED

but seriously, i have this really strong feeling that this is actually a really big problem with modern film production

i mean, I don't work in this shit, i don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm extrapolating from a lot of stories about early CG and practical model work

there's a story from the production of deep space nine where they ended a season with a cliffhanger communicated through a model sequence, but when they got the opticals back from the FX house they were horrified to discover that they had applied a lot of artistic license, and turned "a little ship joins a fleet of other ships" into "a little ship joins a fleet of other ships, who all then warp away together."

it wrecked their storyline, since it suggested a sudden flight into battle that was not in the script, and since it was far too late to change it, they had to substantially alter the plot of the next season to accommodate the change.

now imagine applying that to about 40 to 50 percent of what you see on the screen. there's an article i've been slowly working my way through for months for some reason (it's not that long, I just haven't committed to finishing it) that makes the assertion,

Hollywood executives prefer the high costs of a film that is reshaped in post, that has 5,000 percent more footage, for a simple reason: digital filmmaking offers more opportunities for studio executives to control the picture after it’s been shot.

it's written in the context of george lucas' variously absurd alterations to the original star war, but, yeah, this is probably true in general. the fact that so much is done in CG means so much can be redone, which has advantages as far as studio control.

but when huge swaths of what's on the screen doesn't exist until post, just how much of it is actually controlled by the studio, executives or otherwise? i don't mean what is in their control, I mean what do they bother exerting control over?

To put that differently: if you're a director, even the most apathetic, artless director on the earth, you still can't shoot a scene until the set is built and the props are chosen. the people doing those things - your set decorator, your propmaster, whatever - are your coworkers. they're there, on the set. you could ignore them and act like they don't exist, I suppose, but you'd really have to work at it.

they are standing in front of you going "steve, hey steve, should we go with this clapped out Macintosh, or give the protagonist the awful Vaio I found at the thrift store?" and you have to choose one or the other, or consciously say "I don't care, you pick." but then, everyone else on set might look at that and go "huh. a Vaio? really, steve?"

what's the process for adding a virtual computer interface with CG look like? are the staff ever in-house? does anyone know what these effects will look like when they're shooting, or do they only ever find out months later? does the director, or producer, or anyone else actually work directly with the effects people?

it always feels like I hear about CG being done exclusively by contractors, so I can only imagine it's that same old process of "ship the footage to the FX house, talk to them over the phone, maybe send some emails, and then they send back a demo clip and you either accept it or tell them what they got wrong."

in that scenario you could drive over to the little concrete tilt-up in burbank with the twelve cubicles inside to go "hey, you didn't really get what i had in mind, let me sketch something on the whiteboard," but unless it's a really egregious misunderstanding, are you going to bother? yeah, heavy use of digital-everything maybe means that the notional Executive Suit can say "we've decided the bad guys in this scene should all have red shirts instead of green" and that can just Happen, but when that process is applied to gobs of stuff that the notional Suit doesn't give a shit about, then how often do those things just fall through the cracks entirely?

in past decades, movies actually counted how many optical shots they had. it was a known number. i feel like at this point they must have given up counting though, right? like this movie i just watched - I don't think there's a single scene in the entire production that doesn't contain an "optical" of some kind.

at the point where you're, like, inserting graphics over a 12-frame closeup of someone's cellphone ringing, if the FX house does just a garbage job of it, but it still looks vaguely phoneish, are you going to get in your car and drive over there, or even bother with a zoom session? or are you just going to shrug, because this isn't Principal Photography, it's not Making A Movie anymore, it's just one little detail in a whole shower of little details?

now that i say that, I guess I'm downplaying my own experience here. I am a professional filmmaker, for whatever that counts for! youtube ain't the same thing as TV or cinema but i get paid to make cheap, simple documentaries, and I do, actually, have experience with exactly this set of problems, which... perhaps is why all these thoughts are bouncing around in my head, now that I think about it. lmao.

okay, let's reset and do this again

I shoot a couple videos a month. it often takes me over a week to write a script, partly because I'm spending so much time planning around what I'm going to do in post. then I finally go in and shoot the god damn thing, and it takes six hours to shoot, but for that time I am working. that is The Real Work. i'm serving as director, cinematographer and performer, and I have countless options for how to shape what I'm making.

i can choose to change something from a dry fact into a joke, and that can influence how two pages of script play out. i can choose to do an extreme closeup, and that alters how I play to the camera, or I can say "let's do the last 15 minutes over, I have a different idea for how that should all fit together," or just "let's lose that whole segment, it's a nothingburger."

it's frustrating and tedious at times, but by and large, I am striding. I am clearing my throat and launching into a diatribe, sometimes ignoring the teleprompter because I've just had a great idea about something I can adlib, much to my girlfriend's chagrin (she runs the prompter and sometimes I make her lose the thread, sorry hon) and sometimes I'm clearing a whole page of script in one take, and sometimes we're agonizing over it for 40 minutes, but for the whole time I am MAKING SOMETHING

and then I get home, and it's time to Edit it. oh, how i dread editing. it's a million little Questions, and you don't want to answer any of them, but they all demand an answer. a separate answer, laboriously produced, with full consideration.

I do the roughcut of the video, and then I go through and find every single place where I want an asset - a still image or a video clip. in other words, i identify every optical shot, where I'm going to enhance the raw footage with additional material that I didn't actually choose before shooting the video.

often i end up with 80 or more assets for a simple video. every single one has to be chased down on google images or google books or internet archive or photographed or scanned or created from scratch. and that process is miserable. it just sucks. sometimes i have to spend 40 minutes, or two hours, or a day trying to find a simple still image to illustrate something that I KNOW is true, but it turns out that nobody has ever made a picture that concisely communicates that, or at least not one I feel comfortable using.

subconsciously, I'm ranking every asset. the stuff that gets more attention is always during the meat of the video, the Big Reveal, or the big historical Point that I'm trying to make or whatever. the stuff that's not so important, I hate working on at all because it's stealing so much time away from those more important parts, so I end up half assing it all the time.

when I write the script for a video, I pay attention to every single part of it. i don't have a choice, it's all one big blob. when I do the shoot, I am Working the whole time. for all 6 or 8 hours I am on the clock and doing my job as well as I can. when I'm editing though? I fucking give up on an asset as soon as I can

oh, i need a picture of "a mac"? let's go, google images, get a mac. hurry. who cares what model. there are far more important things, this is just illustration for an incidental offhand comment, just get something, right now, and shove it in there.

this means that some of my videos have pretty crappy incidental stills! sometimes i illustrate something with a really terrible picture, and I only notice weeks later when I rewatch it that I really could have done a better job. but once I stuck that jpg in there, I said "that's done, cool, we can stop thinking about it" and never looked at that part of the video again.

if hollywood people aren't doing this, i'll eat my hat. movies now have incidental opticals, just like my crap, pictures they did not need and which were not in the script, but they shoved in during post because it was "free." i guarantee you those do not receive the full undivided attention of the creative staff, and that is a huge shift from in-camera filmmaking, where... you can't really do a halfass job of filming a control panel, because it's part and parcel with the rest of the damn scene!

if the camera is set up right, there's no hair in the gate, your focus puller isn't asleep, you know, if everyone's at least going through the motions, doing their jobs at all, you will get a perfectly good shot, and if you aren't doing that, then the rest of the production will be ruined anyway. you either do or don't do a good job of running the camera, but the room for halfassing CG inserts and simply not noticing it seems vast.