I say that because nearly every film and TV program that comes out, when it shows a computer screen, has some fantastically unrealistic magic going on. So the expectation is set high, and when clients come to you to design their website, they wonder why you can’t make it work like that.
From the orchestra-conductor interface in Minority Report to the fantasy computers on the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek (you like how Captain Picard can talk to the computer, but the bridge crew still has to push a million buttons to drive the ship?), the film and TV industries are acting like they’ve never seen a computer in their entire lives.
Here’s the specs for the Hollywood Operating System.
You’ll recognize it all.
And here’s some more dumb Hollywood hacking cliches.
You’ve seen them all, too.
And for you hardcore programmers, here’s the list of all the ways Hollywood misrepresents code.
Really, we need a Hollywood webkit. They’ve come close to that a few times already! There’s the LCARS interface from the Starship Enterprise, recreated as a theme for the Enlightenment window manager. Hey, if you can’t beat-em, join-em, right?
But even better, we need to encourage Hollywood to represent our profession more realistically. One flick that got it right was 2001’s Hannibal. Notice how the characters use technology in this movie? A character looks up Hannibal Lecter using something that looks a lot like Google, and gets to something that looks a lot like the FBI’s most wanted list, all while using an ordinary operating system on an ordinary computer.
See? It can be done!
