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Movie scene was card to swallow
Matthew Gardner is upset, ‘in an IT office at Durham Uni’, from where he brings us this week’s examples of Hollywood IT idiocy.
‘In the 1992 film House of Cards, Kathleen Turner’s architect has an autistic daughter that builds a giant house of cards in their living room.
‘In a scene that has to be the most remarkable and quickest home IT project ever depicted in a movie (lasting about 10 seconds’ screen time, suggesting about 10 minutes real-time), she takes black and white photographs of this house of cards, develops the photos and uses a flatbed scanner to scan them into her CAD program – where they are magically re-assembled back into a three-dimensional structure.
Now Kathleen Turner picks up the VR headset that is lying next to the desktop computer and flies around the inside of this structure, where the scene ends with her discovering the artwork on all the cards has miraculously been restored to full colour. In 1992 my desktop computer would have had an asthma attack just trying to scan in a single photo.’
For those of you who missed that particular epic, Matthew also nominates a more famous film.
‘Of course, just three years later Sandra Bullock was receiving web sites on floppy disks delivered by her friendly Fed-Ex man in The Net. It wasn’t really surprising that she couldn’t find the site online; by the end of the movie she was trying to address computers using .345 as one of the IPv4 octets.’
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