Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2010 September 13

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September 13

Are Apple Macs overrepresented in movies and TV?

I read that Apple Macs have a market share of ~10% yet it seems much higher in the TV shows and movies I watch. If a non-Mac is shown on screen, it is rarely identified as a well known PC brand and the programme makers seem to out of their way to disguise the machine's brand (though strangely, the brand of the monitor is not hidden). For example: in the Stargate franchise, I often noticed NEC monitors but the laptops in Stargate Atlantis were disguised by pretending the screen was in the base and always presenting the bottom of the case to the camera - I could easily recognise fan vents and panels used to access the battery, memory, disk, etc. So why is it that I rarely see Dells, HPs, Acers and so on while the other half of the TV and movie characters have clearly identifiable Macs and are using them the righ way up? Is this simply product placement or just influenced by the higher prevalence of Macs on the desks of creative types like set designers? Astronaut (talk) 07:25, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

It's not product placement. It's mainly because Apple computers are (rightly or wrongly) perceived as being cool and trendy. If the programme makers want to depict a computer-using character as cool they just put a Mac in front of them. --Viennese Waltz 07:45, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes 200tribblesonDS9 (talk) 16:02, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

I always thought it was because Macs are the computer of choice for graphic artists, media types and design applications. --TammyMoet (talk) 17:59, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Are you all saying that these film producers are giving Apple totally free advertising? What a sweet deal for Jobs, if true. Usually companies have to pay to have their products positioned. Like one of the funnier credits in the marathon-length closing credits of the first Superman film, "Cheerios by General Mills". (Maybe kind of a slap at Kellogg's, which used to very-prominently sponsor the old TV series and radio show, but now we're jumping the track a bit.) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:02, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Yellow

Why are the Simpsons yellow? My sister told me it was because the creator only had a yellow pencil when he/she made them. Is that true? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Oceancalm (talk • contribs) 15:23, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

There is the transcript here of an answer Matt Groening himself gave to this question when he was asked it during a BBC TV children's show. He said:

"Yellow wasn't my choice. You initially work in black and white, and one of the animators suggested that we colour them yellow, and it looked right. Then again, she also made the trees purple, which we didn't go for. It means the Simpsons look like no other cartoon characters, though." - Karenjc 15:44, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

There is also this interview: [1] which states that the choice was made by colorist Georgie Peluse: "She had a weird, wonderful sense of color design. A really interesting sense of color. I think she did that because Bart, Lisa and Maggie had no hairlines, and if you made them flesh-colored it would look very strange. It wouldn't work. To Matt's credit, he looked at it and said, "Marge is yellow with blue hair? That's hilarious--let's do it!"" --Jayron32 16:03, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Another explanation I heard is they made them yellow as a joke so people would go crazy fiddling with the color settings on their TVs trying to make the characters look "right." I may have even heard that on a DVD commentary. That comment may itself have been a joke, however. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 23:00, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Special Effects

I'm watching TrueBlood right now. How do they do the special effect where the vampires go really fast, yet everything else is normal speed. Do they film it fast, or do the actors move really slowly and the vampires at normal speed, then they speed the film up? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nachiketoshi (talk • contribs) 16:18, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

I would imagine that effect is done by some compositing process where they film the actor on a green screen or insert a CGI model and overlay the running shot over the background. This is, of course, a huge oversimplification of the process required to achieve a convincing composite shot, and there are many other effects that go into the process of making the vampires in True Blood run incredibly fast. If you go to youtube and look up compositing, there will be many examples of the process of combining CGI and real actors into one shot, or in some cases combining multiple set pieces into a single scene. 206.131.39.6 (talk) 16:43, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

We just had a similar question a couple of weeks ago. Adam Bishop (talk) 17:36, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

You mean, they're not REAL vampires??? Juliankaufman (talk) 15:16, 14 October 2010 (UTC)