According to Amend’s web page, he holds a bachelor’s degree in physics.
Two points.
First, in Civilization III, if you have an active unit in a town in civil disorder (smoke coming up) occasionally the unit will cough from the smoke.
More to the point, however…
In Shakespeare in Love there’s a young male character who hangs around the theatre. He’s the one who yells “I seen her bubbies!” He’s also the one who says he likes the fight scenes and later plays with a mouse before giving it to a cat.
He’s John Webster. Webster was a playwright in the early 1600s who wrote gory, violent plays. There’s nothing in the movie that would make you aware of this if you didn’t know the history there.
I love how Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie is able to introduce the viewer to a staggering number of characters within the space of the first 10 minutes simply by including one or two details that are just right for giving you a sense of the type of person they are.
That whole movie is filled with gorgeous little details. Heck, in a way it’s about those little details.
Twin Peaks - As the Briggs family is leaving the house for Laura’s funeral, Mrs. Briggs has a smiley face pin on the lapel of her coat.
What follows is a spoiler from Firefly, from the episode “Bushwacked.” I’m boxing the whole thing just in case.
[spoiler]They got all suited up, discussed the fact that the other ship might not have any atmosphere, yadda yadda.
They go over to the other ship, and they were playing the flashlights around, and the beams are clearly deliniated by dust. Well, if there wasn’t a damn atmosphere, then there wouldn’t have been anything to hold the dust up against the ship’s artificial gravity.
But then it turned out that there was an atmosphere. And I felt much better. :D[/spoiler]
Every Miyazaki film I have seen has something like this.
Two that stick with me:
[bold]Totorro[/bold]: The two girls are going over the little bridge over the stream in front of their house, and one peers over into the stream. You now see a shot of the stream for maybe all of two seconds. Most animators would at best have had a background for this. Miyazaki has an esquisitely detailed background, over which a fish is swimming. Incredibly realistic, and you never see this again in the film.
[bold]Porco Rosso[/bold]: Porco is driving a truck & whips it around in order to lose the secret police. You see a shot of the back of an alley for a second. Highly detailed, including trash along the base of the wall.
Playstation 2 - NCAA Football 2003.
If you play a game in the snow, you can see the players’ breath, and as the game wears on more snow collects on the field. Likewise, if it’s raining and the game’s on natural turf, the field gets muddier as the game wears on.
Players and on-field refs occasionally have collisions - and between-play video cuts to coaches, etc - I once saw the coach slip and fall in a rainy game.
If the game’s really a rout, spectators leave the stands as the game wears on.
And to top this all off, I’m really not an ‘American’ Football fan (soccer is really my favorite sport), and my knowledge and interest of Football is lacking. The game was a birthday gift. Granted, I had relatively low expectations for the game, but I really didn’t think I’d enjoy it nearly this much.
In the street scenes of Road to Perdition, the shops in the background have display windows full of period-appropriate goods and such. You don’t even see them if you’re looking at the action on-screen, and in fact I didn’t consciously notice until I saw freeze-frames. Good stuff. Being on that set must’ve been like stepping into a tiny, very loud, electronics-laden slice of the 1930s…
In the movie of the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena, there is always water when you see the character Touga. You eventually find out that he is a ghost, he drowned while rescuing a drowning girl
In the Simpson’s episode where Lisa is trying to convert everyone to vegetarianism, she brings out a bowl of gazpacho and offers it to everyone at the town picnic. In the background you can here Barney say, “Go back to Russia!”
Another one from anime…
In the series Boogiepop Phantom there are a lot of cool little details that you don’t notice until the story slides into place near the end.
The coolestthing, though, is the butterfly girl. She sends out these butterflies that contain memories, she only speaks by repeating the words of others in her little girl voice. At one point, someone sees one of her butterfly memories- which is a really shocking scene- and cries out “what the hell was that!” to which she replies “what… the hell… was that…”
The cool thing is that everyone I’ve shown it to says “what the hell was that!” just before the characters say it- it’s an echo of the audience reaction.
In the anime series Cowboy Bebop (which is set in the future), the main character visits a Native American-style shaman in his old tent. One of the little details in the tent is an original Playstation.
Since I don’t know how to the spiffy black box thing, SPOILERS
In Fallout II, there’s an Easter Egg of sorts, which is the Guardian of Forever from the Origianl Star Trek. You travel back in time when you walk through it, and find yourself in Vault 13. If you fiddle with one of the computers, you break a water chip, which gets the whole game started in the original Fallout… I thought that was rather clever