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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Well if nothing else this suggests there is a lifestyle level business in the Entertainment industry doing "code" inserts. The article lays out all of the things that are challenging (copyright issues, continuity issues, and cost) so building a small consulting firm around providing "code" for these situations cost effectively and reliably solves a need.

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.

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Did you see the article by the guy who did the effects for Tron: Legacy? Brilliant stuff.

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)

Wow, that is obnoxious to read the whole thing in that font.

This isn't an important enough specialty to make a living out of, because the number of people who are about what the actual code is such a tiny % of the viewing audience that it's not going to have any meaningful impact on sales. If there's a big budget with lots of VFX (like Iron Man) the VFX crew will get the job of sourcing 'teh codez' and most likely will just use some deprecated code of their own since high-end VFX software is all script-based anyway.

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.

That is an interesting position. My reasoning is that more and more people are becoming "developers" of a sort, certainly being exposed to this stuff earlier, and that makes them more discriminating consumers. Nothing quite takes me out of my suspended disbelief like a botched 'tech' reference. So as the pool of moderately computer literate people expands, the impact of 'bad tech' in the movies will hit more audiences negatively.

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 totally agree about the audience coming to expect better; I just don't think it will ever make for a specialized job because as more people write code (or something) as part of their job, so will the number of people who do so within Hollywood and who will quickly lay their hands on the relevant imagery.

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.

I wonder if the show CSI used a Markov Chain to create the last line in this scene:

"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 would suspect they mostly would not care enough about it to spend more than what they already do on what amounts to a special effect which most of the time they could just do without. Bear in mind that outside of programming circles, nobody minds how implausible code actually looks, so long as it looks sufficiently "computery."

That's true, but it's so easy to grab actual code with a permissive license that I don't think either this or the "we have time time constraints" explanation given in the OP can explain this.

That still assumes there is someone in the decision making chain who cares that much about it. It's important to you, and it would be annoying to me to see something like HTML being passed off as an encrypted intercept or alien transmission or something. But realistically it's almost always a brief sequence with "stuff" on a screen, and it's probably part of a scene which can (as the article mentions) be changed or canceled at a moment's notice, and you're meant to be looking at the actor(s) anyway. If it's being handled by an effects team, they're probably prioritizing other things which get more screen time.

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."

> That still assumes there is someone in the decision making chain who cares that much about it.

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.

I think the best clients to focus on would be the visual effects artists themselves. It might be better done as a software package or library rather than a service.

> and some markov-chain like software which can generate plausible looking code on demand.

... or you could even just write some code for the occasion on the occasion - it could be quite fun. :)

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