My favorite example of time f@#$ery in action movies is probably in skydiving scenes where people are in freefall for an impossibly long time. (And yeah, MythBusters busted Point Break for this.)
Those don’t annoy me though, the ones that annoy me (because they’re jarring and kinda pull me out of the movie) are when there’s an incoming train about to run them over or whatever and it’s clearly obvious they should be hit any moment… but apparently the train is stuttering and stopping intermittently because the protagonists inevitably get away well after they should have been flattened.
Thanks for mentioning this. I just watched a clip and it is indeed a (super fast) drive down memory lane. ISTM back in the day, every action movie had shots of Terminal Island / Vincent Thomas Bridge.
As to the OP, I relate. This topic reminds me of how much I like when a book has a map of the locations involved. Games of Thrones opening sequence is a creative way to remind viewers of the relevant geography, but I don’t know how you’d do that in a film.
Some of the comments here note that films with medium-to-small budgets can’t show the full battle. But I hate modern CG army battles, such as LOTR or Avengers Endgame, where you can show large battles and battlefields. But what you end up with is massed armies of indistinguishable warriors run at each other in a hand-to-hand melee. I have no idea who is who, how they are doing, or ultimately why I should care. I know the good guys are going to win; wake me when we get there.
eta: I still have no idea of the sequence of battle at Gettysberg, or why one thing led to another.
Cool! Just a month ago, I went to an exhibit of the ORIGINAL maps you see there, including pencil preliminary sketches. It was in the musty old room of the Geography Department at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). The maps were by Karen Wynn Fonstad, a cartography instructor who cold-called the LOTR publishers just after Tolkein’s death.
I do the same thing, but on a smaller scale. While watching 2001, I tried to figure out where the centrifuge was located withing the Discovery, and how it was oriented. We see the inside of the pod bay, and the doors on the outside, so that establishes where that room is located, and the size of the forward hull relative to a human. There’s a flight deck, the emergency airlock, plus that computer room where Dave disables HAL, and the ladder which accesses the centrifuge; it all has to fit in there somehow. Kubrick was so meticulous that I expect he had a mental map of how it all fit together. I found a book that has a sketch of the inside layout, and it was pretty much how I pictured it.
Interestingly, when I saw the sequel, I thought there was an error. When the Discovery is found, it’s tumbling end-over-end because the contrifuge has seized, transferring that momentum to the ship as a whole. The axis of rotation of the centrifuge was on the long axis of the ship. I think I’ve mentioned it here before, and someone with better Physics chops than I said it was plausible. Thinking back on it, the rotation was probably too fast for the amount of energy involved, and the CG was suspiciously right at the center of the ship.
I went to a talk and book signing by Roger Ebert once, and I remember him mentioning intersecting eyelines in films. Apparently, in early, silent movies, when two characters were having a conversation, each one would be shot separately, looking straight into the camera, but that didn’t look right. Eventually, the art developed enough film it differently. Even when characters are in close-up, one will be on the right looking to the left, and the other vice-versa. That their eyelines intersect makes it seem to the audience that they’re looking at each other’s eyes.
I’ve seen it explained somewhere that there’s an imaginary line down the middle of any movie scene. The camera has to stay on one side of that line. We’re not watching a play on a stage, but things are filmed from one side to avoid disorienting the audience.
A great example of spatial orientation is at the end of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. There’s a shootout among the three characters in the center of a cemetery. They start out close together, and gradually spread out. The camera switches to a wider shot so we can see where they’re standing, relative to each other. The shots become closer and closer. As their eyes dart back and forth, we know who they’re looking at. Each character has a different type of holster, so when there are close-ups of their hand hovering near their guns, we even know whose hand we’re looking at. It’s bbrilliant.
Except it’s pretty clear it’s bigger inside than outside. The computer, command deck, pod bay and centrifuge (plus life support and everything else they need) won’t all fit in that sphere.
And if the camera crosses the axis, it’s disorienting. You can tell. You might not be able to know why but you know something is wrong.
ISTR that in one of the early episodes of the original series (maybe even the pilot), they actually did an establishing shot which zoomed into the top of the saucer, and showed that that was the bridge location.
I opened this thread expecting to read about that thing that many, many fims and TV shows do where character 1 appears, surprising character 2, when character 2 should have clearly seen C1 approach them.
Yeah, in original pilot, and then reused when the pilot was edited into the episode “The Menagerie”. I remember when I was a kid I thought the bridge took up the whole saucer section. Didn’t know the ship had to be big enough for 430 people.
There’s a scene at the end of one of the James Bond films where he thinks he’s alone with the babe-du-jour until some helicopters descend into view. Yes, they were hiding by being off the top edge of the movie screen.
The bridge is the top semi-dome on top of the teardrop:
Importantly, the small cylinder on the centerline of the ship at the back of the bridge dome is the bridge turbolift. The captain’s chair and helm/navigation console face the viewscreen. “Forward”. BUT, the turbolift door is not right behind the captain’s chair.
Which means the bridge is turned something like 30 degrees to port, for no real reason. An odd configuration that gains nothing.
I’m pretty sure TNG fixed that, and the bridge “points” forward on the D.
I understand your contention. But just looking at the model I don’t see the necessity of that conclusion. Plausible? Yes. Necessarily true? IMO no.
Turbolifts travel vertically & laterally. There’s no reason there could not be a curve in the lift’s path while it’s buried in the saucer where we can’t see it. If indeed that ridge at the back of the saucer is the lift channel, you’ll notice it would also pass several decks below the bridge. IOW, the lift’s path is already not a straight line from the bridge door to the external channel we see.
As to “no reason” for the lift door to be offset, there’s a very clear reason. They wanted the blinkenlights & Uhuru to be in the background of every shot taken that is directly facing the bridge team from the main viewscreen’s POV. Having a plain red door back there would be visually boring.
As always, the “engineering” of early trek is pure guesswork & nonsense with little real thought given by the writers. You’d almost think they were doing low budget throwaway work that’d they expected would be forgotten a season later. Because they were.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. The turbolift door is placed where it is for the purpose of staging; from the standard bridge camera shot, characters can be seen entering and exiting through the door. I don’t know when someone first said " hey, the bridge must be oriented 27.3 degrees off the longitudinal axis of the ship!" I can’t imagine it was planned that way.
I thought of another example of the 180-degree rule, televised football. For years, all the cameras covering a football game were on one side of the field. You knew which team was going right-to-left, and vice versa. When they did introduce cameras showing the opposite perspective, there was a caption that said “reverse angle”. It would be confusing to see a replay with players running the wrong direction.
(Not literally every camera. There would be one in each end zone, and maybe one on the far side to get shots of players and coaches on the near sideline.)
I would bet there’s a whole science/art of televising sports in such a way that our spatial perceptions are maintained. And we’re so used to it that we don’t question or even notice how much effort goes into it.
