Movie and TV GUIs: Cracking the Code

rjmarvin writes "We've all seen the code displayed in hacking scenes from movies and TV, but now a new industry is growing around custom-building realistic software and dummy code. Twisted Media, a Chicago-based design team, started doing fake computer graphics back in 2007 for the TNT show Leverage, and is now working on three prime-time shows on top of films like Gravity and the upcoming Divergent. They design and create realistic interfaces and codebases for futuristic software. British computer scientist John Graham-Cumming has drawn attention to entertainment background code by explaining what the displayed code actually does on his blog, but now that the public is more aware, studios are paying for fake code that's actually convincing."

Godzilla 2000 used the whats new in mame txt file

[Joe_Dragon]

Godzilla 2000 used the whats new in mame txt file on a system shown at high speed maybe they can just take txt files from anywhere and show them at speed that needs freeze frames to read them.

Leverage, for one, was a masterpiece

[Lumpio-]

A brilliant combination of real software and fake GUIs on the same screen - they obviously had a product placement deal with Microsoft, and in one scene they literally dragged a file from SkyDrive into the usual bleeping "FBI Database Lookup" window. I wish I had a .gif of that...

Revolution (the TV Show)

[cmeans]

Feb. 27th, Revolution had code scrolling on the screen (yes they were debugging at light speed), but they stopped at a C function that did actually have a runtime bug that matched the story line (an unused/released C malloc). The only thing that spoiled it was that the same statement was missing a semi-colon, so the code wouldn't have actually compiled in the first place.
Oh well...it was nice to see some code that did actually match what the characters were babbling about...even if there were other things that they did that didn't make any sense what-so-ever to someone who actually understood what they were seeing on the computer screen.

Re:Facial recognition

[drinkypoo]

In any case, the trouble with TV facial recognition portrayals is less the software itself (because I can handle a dramatization of a computer search like that), I'm more offended by the portrayol of the results. There are no false positives (finding the wrong people) and false negatives, (failing to find people who ARE in the system), or multiple results. No its always either... face goes in and perp comes out... or face goes in and computer declares the person doesn't exist.

Statistically nobody would even understand what they were on about unless they devoted an entire episode to the concept. Which might be reasonable, of course.