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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

This is the answer. The food is perfectly fine. It's fresh, there's catering on set, and it can be replaced as needed, unless it's something super unusual.

BUT if you eat the food in one shot you need to eat it in all the shots for continuity, so you can edit it together. Get ready to start barfing after 40 big bites of the same damn thing.

If you look closely, you'll also see the coffee/tea cups actors sip from are usually empty. Can't afford the risk of accidentally spilling liquid on the costume and delaying the shoot.

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I assumed the drink cups were empty/opaque so there was no continuity problem. If you splice together different shots, but the liquid level bounces around, it could be distracting.

> If you look closely, you'll also see the coffee/tea cups actors sip from are usually empty. Can't afford the risk of accidentally spilling liquid on the costume and delaying the shoot.

If I were a prop-master (is that what it is called?) I've always thought that I'd just have a bag of plaster of paris handy. Then 30 minutes before going on set just dump some in the prop-cup with some water.

Sets quickly, density is about the same, physics of the cup should look convincing. Probably best for disposable cups though.

Scott Reeder (who is a prop master and makes short videos on about his craft on various platforms) has weighed down disposable cups a couple different ways. One was dropping a mini water bottle into the cup, and another was dyed food grade silicone (for when the shot required a cup with the lid off).

> If you look closely, you'll also see the coffee/tea cups actors sip from are usually empty. Can't afford the risk of accidentally spilling liquid on the costume and delaying the shoot.

Sometimes they are colored water, so you cannot drink but it still looks like a cocktail. Or at least that's how it was on the few movie sets I've been at.

This is why everyone eats takeaway noodles in a box in sitcoms.

One thing I noticed over and over, from cheap sitcoms to expensive blockbusters - when actors sip, they have liquid, but clearly the movement of glass to mouth is 'dishonest', as in too fast or too low for any liquid to actually make it into mouth. No swallowing movement of throat neither.

I guess its subconscious - they know they are not going to actually drink it, they focus their mind on other aspects of acting, so this part leaves them not faking it well.

If you see it once, you can't stop noticing it elsewhere afterwards, beware.

> unless it's something super unusual

I want to believe the gagh is real.

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