Designing the Computer UIs In Movies 371
xandroid points out an NPR interview with Mark Coleran, who
"...designs the fancy-but-fake graphics that flash across computers in the movies. He has worked on a laundry list of blockbusters: The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Ultimatum, Children of Men, Mission Impossible III, and many more. He says a lot of the inspiration for computer screens comes from video games." The main point of these fake movie UIs is different than that of real UIs: to tell a story very quickly, not to reveal and enable function.
This wouldn't be a problem except... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Story? (Score:3, Insightful)
LCARS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Story? (Score:3, Insightful)
People who think fake UIs are real. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This wouldn't be a problem except... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I'd say this is more of a problem with the inability of people to seperate reality from fantasy than any fault on the part of Mark Coleran and similar people. Aren't these people the same people who tell their children that they shouldn't believe everything they see on TV?
Besides, this guy has done one major thing, if nothing else. Apparently he, or others in his line of work are the ones to thank for the brilliant game that is Uplink coming into existence.
they look absurd (Score:3, Insightful)
Usually when I see one of these computer screens the absurdity is quite distracting - often because it looks like a computer game and not software being used by highly skilled professionals at work. Actually that's a bit unfair, most games' UI is and looks much more usable. It doesn't help when the script calls for software that apparently comes with a button simply labelled "magically solve your problem".
Re:This wouldn't be a problem except... (Score:3, Insightful)
So because some people are stupid and can't distinguish fantasy from reality we should stop with the fantasy?
You're all for banning violent video games too, right?
Re:Clever girl (Score:5, Insightful)
Well I rather see some fancy things in movies. Movies generally never show exact true life anyway in any area. Why should they in computer.
Life isn't a soap opera. Life isn't a love story. Life isn't about looking like Brad Pitt. Life isn't an action movie. You aren't Vin Diesel.
But movies are entertainment. I rather see some fancy looking computer interface in a movie than watch gentoo compiling nano for 50 mins and then crashing to an unresolvable state that requires complete reinstall of the system.
"Narrative Causality"... (Score:5, Insightful)
Real UIs always have a strongly generic character, because they are usually rather multipurpose(and even the fairly strongly single-purpose ones, industrial inventory systems and such, are often just special cases of horribly general enterprise stacks, hacked together by hacks for economic reasons). They have to expose a great many of the system's features because they have no way of knowing which ones the user is going to want. Movie UIs can be highly specific, without any visible provision for doing anything other than what is happening at that very moment; because they exist only for the purposes of the story. A particularly driven production team might want to make them look more generic, just to enhance the verisimilitude of the world by making it seem less wrapped around the story; but that is very much optional.
This is analogous to how movie plots work. In a movie, everything that happens, every character who exists, all accidents of fate, and so forth, is there by design, in order to advance the plot. There might be red herrrings, specifically to throw the audience off, or generic extras, to make things look realistic; but everything that matters exists and acts because it serves the plot. In real life, things just exist, probabilities are settled by chance. Only teleologists and the mentally ill are aware of a grand design being served.
My favorite crutch! (Score:4, Insightful)
Noob: Ok, whatever you say, >
Evil Guy: I have won! I am a Gazillionaire! There is nothing you can do to stop me now
Noob: Oh, Nooooooooo! Release my daughter/wife/boyfriend!
Evil Guy: I have the money already, I'll just shoot them instead
Noob: No, I'll come crashing through the wall in a hail of bullets and stop you
*** Meanwhile, back in the real world! ***
Evil Guy: Send me the money...blah blah blah.
Actual Real Person: OK, here you go
Evil Guy: I have the money now, you get nothing
Actual Real Person (with FBI/Interpol agent): No, you have nothing but an entry on a computer screen. Gov't just froze those Assets and you don't even know it. Now, where is my daughter/wife/boyfriend whatever.
Negotiation begins...
UI doesn't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
UI doesn't matter, but unlimited zoom must be there!
Blame Hollywood (well the Directors, at least) (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, I do this $hit for Hollywood, too. Just did a couple of fake websites this past week. It really is the directors who want this stuff, and despite wanting everything else to be realistic: the acting, the sets, the costumes, somehow the computers on screen are as fake as we can make them.
Re:so hes the guy to blame (Score:3, Insightful)
depends on the show. a lot of scifi is done with flash based overlay's. Or more common when using "video phone" stuff is a green screen to be filled in later.
Re:Clever girl (Score:3, Insightful)
Well I rather see some fancy things in movies. Movies generally never show exact true life anyway in any area. Why should they in computer.
Life isn't a soap opera. Life isn't a love story. Life isn't about looking like Brad Pitt. Life isn't an action movie. You aren't Vin Diesel.
But movies are entertainment. I rather see some fancy looking computer interface in a movie than watch gentoo compiling nano for 50 mins and then crashing to an unresolvable state that requires complete reinstall of the system.
I've seen some pretty cool UIs in movies/shows/24 and wish someone would implement it. :/
But we know the OSS guys can't ever agree on some fancy UI (superfluous) so we never get anything cool [compositing, Ribbon in Office->OpenOffice (yes I know some people find it annoying but a lot of people find it a lot faster at accomplishing most tasks)] till Microsoft does it first
Re:Matrix averted this trope (Score:4, Insightful)
The Matrix outside view wasn't Viewer Friendly, it was supposed to be the 24th century equivalent of a command line. The only guy who could really understand it was the geek.
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not "why is everything a crutch to the story" but "why does the story NEED to rely upon fantasy crutches".
Why did the writer write the story so that it NEEDED a fantasy UI for a computer? Why not some other crutch? One that is more realistic?
The answer is, of course, simple. The writers don't know anything except how to get a job writing for Hollywood. Therefore, ANYTHING that they put in the story will be their personal interpretation of systems that they probably only know through other Hollywood movies written by writers just like them.
Which is one of the reasons why we get so much crap out of Hollywood.
Re:This wouldn't be a problem except... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Clever girl (Score:3, Insightful)
Because designing a slick UI that actually does something better than a simple one is a very difficult task. Even worse, there will be an inevitable backlash from users, because most people don't want to learn anything new... sort of a "if it wasn't broke why the hell did you change it!?!?" mentality.
Re:Clever girl (Score:5, Insightful)
Well-written and well-directed fool the viewer into thinking the events are plausible. The less the viewer must suspend their disbelief, the more enjoyable the movie, play, book, etc. For example: A director could use a real car in a scene. Or they could make the car out of two giant pieces of cardboard with painted-on wheels. Or they could use a real car, but spray paint it with the word "CAR" on the side and replace the steering wheel with a wagon wheel. But generally they don't do that - they use a car that is appropriate to the scene. They should do the same thing for ovens, sandwiches, furniture, and computers. It is a bit odd to see a modern, relatively intelligent scene, where the login screen has dancing lightning beams and lasers firing, and a voice that yells "Access Denied" - no computer actually does that.
you just don't know the right tools (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Clever girl (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a bit odd to see a modern, relatively intelligent scene, where the login screen has dancing lightning beams and lasers firing, and a voice that yells "Access Granted" - no computer actually does that.
FTFY -- that's even more unreasonable.
It's not just computers, it's everything (Score:4, Insightful)
If you watch TV or movies, you see this with virtually any subject you could imagine. What it boils down to is that generally the people making the content need to dumb down everything to what Joe Average expects to see. If you've got greater-than-average knowledge of any field, chances are when you see people doing it on TV they're fucking something up.
We've already heard countless examples of computer GUIs. How about medicine? I was a paramedic, and my wife is an ER doc, and both of us cringe every time we see someone onscreen get a giant needle stabbed into their chest. Ever since Uma got the treatment in Pulp Fiction (maybe there were earlier ones, but that's the first time I remember seeing it) this is a great little dramatic moment that they love to stick into films and TV shows. In real life drugs go into a vein and even if the heart isn't going you can circulate with a little CPR. Jamming giant needles into the heart is just silly.
And while we're on the subject, all the CPR I see onscreen is shit. The last time I was certified was 2005 so I might be out of date, but last I checked we were at 30:2 compression/breath ratio at a rate of about 100 compressions per minute. Our memory aid was that we could compress to the tune of Queen's 'Another One Bites the Dust' (funny, I know) and that would get us pretty close. On TV it's way too slow, not to mention pretty rare that 30 seconds of CPR will magically revive someone without the addition of a defibrillator and lots of drugs.
I don't know dick about car repair, but I know what to do if I'm in a movie. I ask the hot chick on the side of the road to pop the hood, I stick my head in there, jiggle a few wires, then say, "Try it now." Then it'll start right up. Or possibly blow up, depending on the movie. Oh, and if you need to hotwire a car, you just yank that bundle of wires out from under the dash and tap a couple of them together until it sparks.
How about firearms? Again, I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure when you shoot someone with a 9mm it won't knock them off their feet and throw their body 10 feet backwards through a plate glass window. But it sure looks nifty.
General electronics? It doesn't really matter what you're doing here; defusing a bomb, fixing a broken radio, breaking into a vault, etc. You just open up whatever device you're dealing with, connect a few jumpers with alligator clips on the end, clip another wire with a set of cutters and poof, you're golden. Just don't cut the green wire. Or was it the blue wire?
I'm sure most people could come up with similar things they see all the time, these are just a few of the ones that I notice. I probably gloss over lots more simply because for those subjects, I am the Joe Average and whatever they're doing looks totally plausible to me even though someone somewhere is gnashing their teeth over it.
Re:LCARS (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to agree. The LCARS mockups are an outstanding sci-fi user interface.
Although they doesn't really stand up to close scrutiny, they look like something that has been designed for a recognizable task according to design and user interface principles that are familiar, although extrapolated to an astonishing degree. LCARS seems to *guide* its users to information they are seeking, using negative space and alignment to cluster information into logical groupings which the users evidently find easy to navigate.
Like all interesting sci-fi, it has something of a contrarian spirit to it. It's a very *text heavy* interface, although perhaps we should understand this in context. It is an information display for a system that has perfect natural language input and output, and in some cases understands gestural input.
Still, the facility with which the users navigate this very text-centric interface is remarkable, suggesting that there is more going on here than meets the eye. Perhaps the data is arranged in some subtle way into larger semantic chunks that users parse by some kind of visual pattern recognition. This (and the facility with which users adapt to even alien systems) probably means that users are highly systems literate; that they've been rigorously trained in the use of information technology and the theories behind it...
Nah, I just convinced myself that LCARS is fantasy.
Re:"Narrative Causality"... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, your friend was missing the fun part of the UI, the babe, going down on our protagonist in order to crack the DOD login security in 60 seconds.
Re:This wouldn't be a problem except... (Score:2, Insightful)
Can you point me to the bit where he called for CSI to be criminalised?
He didn't. Asking for accuracy doesn't mean you're calling for censorship. FWIW, I'm all for more accuracy in violent video games, too...
Re:This wouldn't be a problem except... (Score:2, Insightful)
You should have mailed it back all blown up, with a picture of an alien pasted onto it, revealed in the reflection of its eyeball. That's what always happened in The X Files, at least.
Re:Clever girl (Score:2, Insightful)
Life isn't a soap opera. Life isn't a love story. Life isn't about looking like Brad Pitt. Life isn't an action movie. You aren't Vin Diesel.
But at the same time life also is each and every one of those things. Just because art and life aren't identical doesn't mean that they are totally disconnected.
As Hitchcock once said, "Drama is life with the boring bits cut out".
Re:Clever girl (Score:4, Insightful)
But we know the OSS guys can't ever agree on some fancy UI (superfluous)...
Lets be honest here, the OSS guys can barely agree on which letter should appear if you press the "A" key, never mind before you introduce shift, ctrl, alt, option, meta, super or chording.
Re:"Narrative Causality"... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is you end up spending 10 seconds explaining to the audience what 2 seconds of fictional computer display does.
Except that's happening already anyway. If something is only onscreen for two seconds, with no other confirmation, you're going to lose the audience.
Think about that "access denied" message. Now imagine, instead, simply zooming in on something like:
Then, whether or not the actor actually explains what's going on, they probably do something like mutter "shit" under their breath...
I mean, think about it. Even with the bright red ACCESS DENIED, you're still usually going to need some sort of exposition to explain why their access is denied, or what they're trying to access anyway.
It doesn't make the movie any more entertaining just like turning the sound off in space scenes doesn't automatically make it better.
Sound in space is similar -- it allows for much easier suspension of disbelief. I think Firefly showed it can also work very well. Granted, it's not automatic -- it can be difficult to write something realistic -- but that's not really an excuse, especially when you consider how much budget there is for effects on a Hollywood blockbuster, they couldn't hire one decent writer?
All it buys you is one less nitpick.
When anyone who is half-awake can nitpick you ("Wait, why is their sound in space? And why are 'lasers' more like little glowing darts -- and how can you have a laser sword that's only a few feet long, yet cuts through steel?"), you kind of fucked up. When the nitpick is something more along the lines of, "But I've done the math, and the Ringworld is unstable!" and all you need to do is throw in a few as-yet undiscovered elements, or handwave it as super-advanced construction, you're doing pretty well.
That's the difference between hard science fiction and fantasy. Frankly, it's much easier for me to get into something like Stardust [imdb.com], which doesn't even pretend to have anything to do with the real world, where you'd actually need a Rules Lawyer to even begin poking holes in it.
I could put it another way -- if computers are playing a major role, geeks are a big potential audience for you. Things like Swordfish, or The Matrix, or even as far back as Hackers -- you've got to realize that the people who would love a movie like that are people who know their way around technology. And then you piss off your fanbase by making Unix some sort of flying-through-a-city-with-lightning-bolts interface, and a virus is some sort of 3D acid-trippy visual, and some random dude can crack 128-bit encryption in under a minute by slamming on a keyboard...
I mean, come on. It's like making a movie about the life of Jesus and filling it with random sex and nudity. It's like if Slumdog Millionaire filmed the slums in a Chicago suburb. It's like if Disney bought Devo and replaced them with some 12-year-olds... oh wait, that happened [wikipedia.org].
Even in an action movie, it's annoying. Unfortunately, since I'll still watch a good movie with bad computers, it's likely to continue...
Re:Clever girl (Score:3, Insightful)
Stuck?? CLI is not the past. CLI is the future. I bet you still think of DOS when you think of CLIs.
Have you ever seen the power of the shell inside Maya?
A real CLI and GUI are and do the same thing at the same time. And this is done perfectly in Maya. You can even drag a selected piece of code from the history/cli to your tool bar, to get a button.
Also BASH plus the UNIX concept are what you use when you really use your computer.
As opposed to just clicking on colorful clickables and using it like an applicance, while completely missing the point of having a computer.
Yes, every Windows, KDE, Gnome and OS X user, who does not also use the CLI, is completely missing the point of having a computer, and should get a appliance. Like a standalone DVD player.
And the designers of those UIs also completely missed the point, by not designing the UIs an a way that empowers you to actually automate things, but limits to to basically having a standalone media player, file manager, etc.
Maya has done it nearly right. They still ignore the 105 keys in front of every user too much, but at least they allow you to connect everything to everything and have everything to be a script or a UI at the same time.