Nice bit of BB trivia, and nice small example of practical effects!
I have a feeling that Festus, at least, averaged a lot of takes.
All the time. They seem to have the amazing ability to just pull some various bills out of their pockets and instinctively know the amount is 15 or so percent above whatever the bill might be…with only a nanosecond long glance at the bills, if they even look at them at all.
Back when it was on, about a day after each episode aired, there was a podcast with Vince Gilligan and Kelly Dixon, one of the editors. In addition to general chit chat about the show, they’d talk about some of the editing techniques as well as the special and practical effects.
They used a lot of practical effects. IIRC Vince preferred them since they were done right then and there while shooting. With special effects, it was considerably more expensive to hire people that specialized in whatever they wanted to do. One I recall them doing quite often is when there would be a gunshot or other loud/startling noise. They’d use SFX to ‘freeze’ the actors eyes before they blink so it doesn’t look like they’re flinching.
Here’s another one, when Walter’s head hits the ground and they zoom in, you can see the dirt ‘crack’. That was done with two plates butted up against each other just under the surface. When he hit the ground someone triggered a mechanism to pull the plates apart, thus creating the crack in the ground (I think it was supposed to represent Walter breaking from reality or metal breakdown or something like that, it’s been a long time).
I can only find a very small, very low-res gif, but you can see the crack appear next to his face.
This is more of a meme annoyance than in the true spirit of the thread, but sweeping everything off one’s desk/table/counter in a fit of rage is really tiresome. Nobody does this in real life. Okay, I can think of one instance at a place I worked.
The finale of The Americans had Philip and Elizabeth standing in front of the entrance to Moscow State University in the middle of the night in winter. They had me fooled for a few seconds—it was so well done, I thought they had actually filmed the scene in Russia. I realized it was all green screen when I saw no breath was coming out of their mounths.
To be fair, the Chemistry bldg at the Faculty of Science had lockers in the hallways when I went there. Mostly for boots and coats in the winter as this was in Manitoba.
In the 1937 Lost Horizon, despite the mountain scenes being shot in an ice house it was not cold enough for the actors’ breath to show. They did the dry ice trick but it slipped and injured Ronald Colman.
The story I heard was that a prop man made little wire cages to hold small pieces of dry ice that the actors put in their mouths, something like what they did on Breaking Bad. But it was so hard to speak with the thing that Colman got frustrated, took the dry ice out of the cage, and popped it straight into his mouth. With unfortunate effects.
In the audio commentary for that episode of BB, a producer/director says this happened in Dirigible, a 1931 film by directed by Frank Capra. The wiki article quotes Capra in a 1972 interview as saying the actor was Hobart Bosworth.
Thanks for correcting the record. That’s what I get for relying on 40-50-year-old memories. I was sure it was Capra, and Lost Horizon made sense, considering it’s setting. So when @DesertDog mentioned Colman, I jumped in with my ancient memory.
Well, I forgot the part about Colman getting rid of the appliance, then getting injured.
Yes, but as @F.U.Shakespeare pointed out, we were both wrong about the movie and the star. Here’s more detail, from Mental Floss:
On the South Pole film Dirigible (1931), which was shot during a Los Angeles heat wave, Capra forced his actors to hold tiny cages of dry ice in their mouths as they acted, in order to make their breath appear. Frustrated with trying to speak around the tiny cage, lead actor Hobart Bosworth decided to get rid of the cage and simply held the ice in his mouth, unprotected. “True trouper that he was, he flung away the cage—and plopped the square piece of dry ice into his mouth as he would a big pill,” Capra recalled. “He fell to the salted ground groveling and screaming. We ran to him. We couldn’t open his jaws! In a panic we rushed him to the emergency hospital in Arcadia.” In the end, Bosworth lost three lower back teeth, two uppers, and part of his jawbone.
In popular scientific documentaries about dinosaurs or ancient beasts, they depict the dinosaur while on the hunt, and right before it attacks its prey, they let it roar very loudly in the direction of the prey. Seems an odd way of hunting. (but then again, they all died out, so…)
but they turned to oil. And then the Arabs came and they bought Mercedes Benzes. And Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di’s clothes. I couldn’t believe it.
There’s an episode of The Nature of Things in which they analyze the vocal and auditory capabilities of T Rex on the basis of fossil evidence. Turns out that tyrannosauruses probably didn’t roar. It’s more likely they growled and grunted (like crocodiles) in low frequencies, since they carry better and are actually more threatening.
When supposedly driving a car, against a back-projection of moving scenery, the driving actor makes wobbling-rapidly movements of the wheel, which, if done for real, would have you weaving all over the road.
Ahhhh, UpNorth, where you can tell you’re alive by the clouds of beer-breath!
Yeah, that lack of condensation really bugs me, too.
Or, worse, take their eyes off the road to look at the person next to them a long, long time while they reel off a paragraph of exposition. This happens even when they use today’s process trailer.
Do I need to spoiler this? In the second series finale of “Sherlock”, right after Moriarty blows the back of his own head off, I turned to my wife and said “Sherlock had better pick that gun up and shoot him a couple more times”