Maybe this has been discussed before, I rarely poke my snoot into the Cafe. This has been bothering me forever and it’s time I got it off my chest.
Actors carrying/holding/picking up/putting down obviously empty cups or glasses. It’s so freaking obvious there’s nothing in that coffee cup… even BEFORE you tilted it towards the camera and proved it.
The motions of a person handling a cup full of scalding hot coffee… and one holding a cup of air are completely different.
To make things worse apparently EVERY show nowadays HAS to have actors holding Starbucks-style STYROFOAM cups that probably weigh about a gram. An actor holding an empty one does not look at all natural.
THEN… they pretend to drink from them, so convincing.
Are they afraid the idiot actors can’t manage a beverage container with actual liquid? Can they not SEE how odd it looks? Am I the only person in the world that notices or is bothered by it?
I can’t say I have noticed that much; I will now of course. What has caught my attention on occasion is when they are supposedly drinking a hot cup of coffee outdoors somewhere cold, Law & Order or something like that, and there’s no steam from the cup. I understand why there wouldn’t be steam coming from the cup of course but it does tend to grab my attention.
Yeah, I get the wine glass dilemma where the level of liquid is visible. Then some prop-weenie actually has to pay attention and do his job. But how does that explain a completely opaque coffee cup with a lid on it. Level isn’t visible, poor clumsy actor isn’t gonna spill it. Put some liquid in it… or… put something with weight that adds some heft to it.
Oh well, this apparently bothers me much more than most people. I’ll give it a rest.
Batfish you are not alone. I always notice that if some one comes into the kitchen and gets a cup of coffee the host will pour in a couple of drops (no way near a full cup) GIVE EM A FULL CUP FOR OGs SAKE!
In one episode (Serenity Now?)of Seinfeld where Frank Costanza is drinking from a styrofoam cup and it is obviously empty and I fixate on it every time I see that scene.
What about talk shows, where some guests comes on and they have a coffee mug there? They often don’t even touch it, and if they do it’s only once or twice. It’s really there only as a prop so that they can do something while the host is talking.
Same thing for Jon Stewart, who always pretends to be writing something when they come back from a commercial break. Do you expect him to actually write something meaningful? What the hell would he need to write then and there? It’s just an act to make it seem like he’s “investigating” something, rather than performing.
When they punch or shoot someone, do you expect them to actually be punched or shot?
Couldn’t care less. Not fiction, I’m not asked to suspend disbelief.
Couldn’t care less. Not fiction, I’m not asked to suspend disbelief.
No, I expect it to look reasonably as if someone was punched or shot. It usually does, in fact they go to lengths to make it so. Stunt doubles, special effects, etc… For beverages… empty cup, nice effort.
I think what Batfish is getting at is that it’s a small issue but so very easily fixed. It makes since that on a long shoot, or a short one for that matter, that it wouldn’t be worth the effort to have someone worrying about the steam coming from the cup or the beverage level. It would be extremely easy, though, to put some liquid in opaque cups so that the acting is more natural; small payoff overall but it would take very little effort to achieve. Just fill the damn cup already!
We had another thread about this not too long ago. I always notice how actors wave their obviously empty coffee cups around. My suggestion is if you don’t want to put liquid in your actors’ cups, at least put some marbles or something in, so they don’t wave the stupid cups around like they’re empty.
When I read the first post, Law & Order came to mind. I have noticed steam coming from the coffee cups. It may not be a full cup in every episode, but they had real coffee in some of them. I’m especially thinking of Briscoe holding a steaming cup.
Maybe Jerry Orbach was a coffee drinker, and they WERE working in the cold, so maybe he was more than happy to have a real cup of hot coffee to sip during the scenes.
What I have noticed is that the coffee cups are always exactly the same on Law & Order, whether they were drinking coffee in the police station or out on the street. They’re about a 10-12 oz. (paper looking or maybe styro) cup with some sort of unreadable logo/design on it. Not the plain white styro cup you’d expect to see around an office coffee maker.
This bothers me, too. And it’s worse in stage productions, where there is no risk of any continuity errors AND you can not only see the cups are empty, you can HEAR it.
Look, it’s a pain in the neck to keep track of beverage levels, and you run the risk of spills getting on someone’s costume and causing problems. The feeling is that no sane person would care about such a nit.
Fill the cup to an appropriate level with white glue dyed the desired color. Let harden. Problem solved: weight, heft, no danger of changing levels or stains. Takes all of 5 minutes of forethought.
