The Hacker Who Cracked the Code in Iron Man and The Social Network
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The go to market strategy is to get writers in the screenwriters guild aware of your offering, and let the lswyers know you provide guarantees, both that your "set" code will not conflict with anyone else's copyright, but also that copyright can be asserted on it so that the film has greater protection out there. Which gets the lawyers insisting the writers use your stuff.
You'll need a good design asthetic and some markov-chain like software which can generate plausible looking code on demand.
http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178
Not a markov chain, he just recorded himself at the shell. It made me grin when I saw that bit in the movie and the commands actually made sense (the rest of the film... not so much)
For non high-end productions (eg where you just have one person with After Effects or suchlike) you can just buy/rent/pirate sample material or fake it up quickly with some 'computerish' looking font - hence the proliferation of fake smartphone screens. It's a pain to photograph a real smartphone with an actual camera; they're usually too bright (even on minimum setting), the screen has reflections, and there are often awkward interference artifacts between the camera's frame rate and the refresh rate & lag of a phone. So if you're doing things on the cheap it's usually easier to just use some color app and make the whole screen a dim green and then match in a generic screen showing a text message or picture of the character who is supposed to be calling.
While this is certainly something a video graphics person could develop a specialty in, you'd have a hard time making it your only thing, same as being a sound designer that only does automobile noises or something. Likewise, when you look at a shot of someone fixing a car you probably don't pause to eyeball the diameter of the nuts and bolts lying on the ground, though pro car mechanics probably hate watching such scenes.
To use a classic example, the computer "interfaces" of Star Trek the original series were perfectly serviceable for people who had never seen an actual computer, but trying to use them on an audience that got their first laptop in grade school just doesn't work.
My speculation is that as people become more sensitive to 'bogus' code standing in for some prop, they will become more put off by it and set designers are going to have to work harder. If you're a shop that can amortize the cost of developing the tools to create 'realistic code inserts' across a number of customers, you can achieve ramen profitability or better.
I mentioned the example of a sound designer who only does vehicle sounds, because that's my particular line. At one time I thought there would be room for developing and selling big libraries of authentic sounds, and I still make a point of recording as many prop-specific sounds on set as possible. But it's a case of diminishing returns - as long as the library and use of stock sounds on a picture is not completely awful/inappropriate, 'good enough' is the prevailing standard, and you're better off layering and recycling sounds in combination with effects or hiring a foley artist. There's an in-joke among sound designers known as the 'Wilhelm scream' (after the character who first uttered it) which has been dropped into thousands of films by now in bittersweet recognition of the fact that 99.99% of moviegoers won't notice its rampant overuse.
"For weeks I've been investigating...the killer with a certain morbid fascination..."
"This is in real time!"
"I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic...see if I can track an IP address!"
Link to clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU
I think this is a key line:
>The stuff that ends up looking the most legitimate, he says, is the stuff that needs to be the most legitimate.
except I would translate this as "the things which aren't meant to be noticed don't have to make sense."
Could be a good thing if you can get enough attention that someone in the decision making chain even has to think about it. You'll become the go-to source for an industry with low standards and no incentive to try out your competitors so long as your rates remain reasonable. The guy who started this Tumblr is actually pretty well-positioned to offer a little white-label service to generate this stuff.
Or, they just walk over to the desk of the nearest friendly developer and ask him to do it in 10 seconds.
... or you could even just write some code for the occasion on the occasion - it could be quite fun. :)
Unless ActionScript somehow becomes the dominant programming language of the future, in which case the future looks darker than I thought.
He said he already has a lot of requests, so I can assume he'll probably do something similar.
This guy was the first one to be mainstream. It's like the MP3 player: Jobs had the audacity to say that Apple basically invented the MP3 player because their MP3 player was the best, not because it was the first. Same story with the iPhone. It wasn't the first touchscreen cellular phone, but it was the best. When a product is the best in class, it gets noticed. This was surely the lesson Jobs learned from Microsoft's success: don't worry about being the first, just worry about being the best or, at least, the loudest.
And in this digital age, that's actually fine. If we valued people only because they had ideas first, nothing would actually be done about it and inventions would not be successful because half of the inventors would keep their creations tailored to their preferences rather than extending a generalised product that caters to everybody.
(I know that you can write in the more dynamic Javascript style w/o type markers, but the integration between those two worlds in AS3 is very poor)
ActionScript 3.0 added optional static typing and classes and efficient binary blob handling and other features and at one point was going to serve as the basis for ECMAScript 4.0 via the Mozilla Tamrin project (so ActionScript would have actually been modern JavaScript) but this was killed (primarily by Microsoft and Yahoo) for political reasons.
AS3.0 was actually a pretty nice language and I would have loved to see it replace JavaScript back then as the usable set of JavaScript features is still quite a bit behind where ECMAScript4 would have brought it years ago.
I remember there was a poll on HN with a huge majority vote against AS; perhaps people confuse it with ActiveX and that's why they seem to dislike it so much.
You may want to check out the haxe language as it borrows quite a lot from ActionScript 3 with tools that allow you to compile your haxe code down to JavaScript, AVM1 (AS2), AVM2 (AS3), C/C++, etc, and while it is a relatively niche language it is a lot more "alive" than ActionScript 3 currently is.
Agreed, but I am ready for the call from Mr. Stark.
the code it's using - http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/kernel/groups.c - is GPL so hollywood may choke on the copyright issue. Press alt x 3, caps lock x 3 or esc for special stuff
Do you think this manual was just sitting on the guy's desk when his manager came with the request "Create an authentic looking code snippet, you've got 5 minutes"? Who are these people who create these "code" snippets anyway? If anyone with knowledge enlightens me I'd be much obliged.
Junior visual FX slaves straight out of art school. Picking it out of an Intel Architecture Manual is the sort of thing you do to neutralize producer/director/supervisor insecurities about authenticity: 'yeah, this is the stuff that the engineers at Intel use, this is as real as it gets.'
[0] http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/10/in-defense-of-mark-zu... [1] http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/course/cs161/notes/vm.pdf
https://www.google.com/#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+movie+co...
Movie director David Fincher uses computer monitors with a green/blue Screen, the computer graphic is added in post production. Check out the behind the scene footage of "Social Network" (2 disc DVD ed)!