Before digital cameras were widely available, every movie set with
any kind of budget at all had a person who went around taking Polaroids
of everything, sets, props, actors. This person's job was to play a real
life game of spot the difference.
Scenes are often filmed over
the course of days, or in the case of reshoots even months, then
stitched together in the editing room post-production. It was the job of
the continuity person to go through the previous days Polaroids and
make sure that the chair was in the same corner of the room and that the
actor's tie hadn't changed color.
Some mismatches inevitably
slip through, particularly on lower budget pictures. Other times, the
discontinuities are noted but unavoidable.( at least before the modern
age of digital retouching ) Carol Burnett often told the story of how
she had had surgery on her jaw shortly after what she had assumed to be
the final shooting for John Huston's screen version of Annie only to be
told a few weeks later that the studio had requested reshoots. She
immediately reached out to Houston and told him that she now had a much
less prominent jaw and the new footage would not match the old. Houston
reassured her that everything would be okay with the direction just go
out and look determined.
Carol Burnett has one of the best
reputations in the entertainment industry for professionalism and could
hardly be blamed for not anticipating the studio's last minute decision.
For a far more notorious example, the book The Devil's Candy which
describes the disastrous production of Brian De Palma's Bonfire of the
Vanities tells how Melanie Griffith returned from a break in the filming
with much larger breasts, much to the surprise of the director and the
producers.
Continuity jumps can be distracting
and often unintentionally amusing in a feature film or television show
but they are far more troubling in footage that claims to depict real
life events. While some may claim the camera doesn't lie, the editing
room certainly can.
What's amazing is how bad the robot is, even if it was actually doing what it claims to be doing. With more money than god, you'd think EM would have hired some competent robotics types, but I guess EM has the problem that anyone smart enought obe a competent robotics type knows better than to have anything to do with EM...
ReplyDeleteYeah, though I doubt that much money was actually spent on this. Tesla's R&D budget is tiny compared GM, VW, and the rest of the industry. Another one of the company's dirty little secrets.
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