Another piece of hollywood hooey is the behavior of electrical equipment. Never, ever have I seen the door of a panelboard blast open with a thunderous bang while the circuit breakers sprays sparks like it’s full of Roman candles. A loud pop, a bright flash, a hearty Hi-Ho Silver, and the overcurrent protective device opens the circuit. That’s about it.
Before anyone with industrial experience hollers at me, yes-higher fault currents and supply voltages can produce deafening blast waves and enough caloric energy to fry chicken at ten paces. I’ve done the 70E training. Just saying that TV/movie depiction of residential/light commercial fault incidents is hogwash.
A few years back, my housemate’s aging 14" TV began to misbehave to such an extent that we decided to use it in an experiment - what REALLY happens when you smash a TV screen when it’s on?
Said TV was relocated to the garden on an extension cable with an Earth Leakage circuit breaker included. A 10kg dumbell was suspended from a “V” of rope so it could be swung, end on, pendulum style into the screen. The whole thing was observed through almost closed windows at night, the dumbell being pulled back and released via a long piece of string. We were prepared for something dramatic and possible frag.
So we let fly, the TV went dark at the impact as the tube filament popped, and the screen just took it with barely a scratch. Repeated attempts and upping the weight just knocked the TV along or over backwards. The most we managed to achieve was to chip off a large flake of screen.
So I still don’t know what really happens, but now I raise my eyebrows a mite every time someone kicks in a TV screen, either on TV or in a movie…
When I was kid I tried this an unplugged portable black & white set, and threw a hammer at it in the woods around back. The thrown hammer bounced off the tube several times before I cracked it enough to get it to implode.
we dropped a 26" CRT TV from chest height while helping a friend move. It bounced 3 times before finally coming to rest on the pavement. She never knew.
I guess the problem with gunshot in movies is that most people are (thankfully) not too familiar with the true sound of gunfire. Those same people are familiar with the sound of toy guns with all kinds of noisemakers (many of which are pretty accurate). So all these people would think that a real gunshot sound sounded too much like a toy gun and would be blah’d by it.
madmonk28 beat me to what I wanted to say. TV, whatever it sounds like, just doesn’t feel like the real thing. You don’t get that ultra-low bass that seems to rattle the ground under your feet or the shockwave that seems to wrap around your body for that brief instant. This may be why the real things that go boom seem scarier than the TV things that go BOOM.
(An unrelated correction: the Lone Ranger used to address his horse thusly: “Hi-yo, Silver!” What’s this “Hi-ho” crap I hear so often? Are people conflating the Lone Ranger with the Seven Dwarves and the song “Heigh Ho”?)
My peeve about movie sound effects is when a character sees a distant explosion, and there’s no time at all between seeing the fireball and hearing the sound. For Pete’s sake, I’ve even seen thunderstorms in the movies where the sound of thunder is simultaneous with the distant lightning.
In Red Dawn there is a delay between the image of an explosion and the arrival of its sound.
Most people haven’t been near an actual explosion, so they think that the sound and the image should be simultaneous. But most people have seen lightning and have heard thunder – and filmmakers still (generally) have the audio and image happening at the same time. I have an idea that this has become such a convention in films that if filmmakers were to depict a lightning storm accurately people would not accept it.
My experience of rounds (bullets)that have passed close by has been a very pronounced CRACK! almost immediatly followed by a dull thump away in the direction of the firer.
The very first car CD player I ever saw belonged to a customer of mine. He would leave a stack of CDs for me to play with while test driving his car (1985ish)
He had a copy of the 1812 Overture that had a sticker that said (IIRC) Caution: Contains digitally recorded cannon fire. Damage to your sound system may occur if played at too high a volume.
Looking at Amazon, I see two versions of the 1812 that have a notice on the front cover that says: Caution: Digital Cannons see inside
Indeed, the Telarc 1812 recording is real and famous. Telarc in general is an audiophile lable and doesn’t use compression. Audiophiles sometimes want to get as close as possible to the real sound, sometimes to test how good the system is.
Yeah, passing supersonic bullets mainly make just one crack (“cack” is how I describe it) while subsonic rounds have the thump of firing first and then a whizzing noise from the bullet.
Anyway, my problem with explosions and gunfights in the movies is that they don’t ruin the hearing of the characters. War movies do have yelling, but in real life even police shootouts are going to cause some temporary damage. When the police have to shoot someone, they should be yelling at each other afterwards because they can’t hear anything, especially if it happened indoors.
Mom lives about 10 miles from a NATO Air Practice Grounds, in a high floor. I’ve been in her house both when the planes were using dead bombs (just a dead weight, no explosion) and you just heard a sort of dull thump coming from over there. I’ve been in her house when they were using live, exploding bombs, and you felt a strange vibration coming from the floor first… then you heard a boom… and a bit later window glass rattled. Depicting this in a movie would need something like: Nava is doing the ironing. Suddnely she looks up, putting down the iron, and says:
‘What’s that vibration? Did the floor move?’ Boom
(silence) windows rattle
That sounds a lot more complicated and less impressive than “big fireball up in the distant sky” and takes more time that “big BOOM, simultaneous with fireball”. It’s just not good drama.
