The 1995 movie The Net is a paranoid thriller about this oddity called the internet.
“Our whole world is sitting there on a computer, it’s in the computer.”
Sandra Bullock’s character chats with Cyberbob, orders her pizza off Pizza.net,
and hangs out with Dennis Miller during that brief window when he was a feature film actor.
“This is, this is bizarre.” As an early cyber thriller, The Net introduced
the internet and, as importantly, a “look” for the internet to a lot of people.
But those webpages weren’t real. Someone had to get those invented graphics on Sandra
Bullock’s computer screen.
“My name’s Todd Marks, I’m a computer video playback
supervisor for feature film, television, and commercials.
I’ve been doing this for about 25 years now.”
Todd’s work shows the incredible detail that goes into major motion pictures, and
reveals secrets behind the screens within screens in movies from
The Net to Steve Jobs.
But it also uncovers a key to how big stories are told well.
A computer playback supervisor gets the graphics on the screens in TV shows or movies.
Sometimes the screens you see in movies are added after the fact, and sometimes they’re
prepared beforehand to shoot along with the scene. People like Todd have to figure out
how to display and make those graphics. Well, as Todd explains:
“Well, the challenges of doing any production graphics, motion graphics, or playback
graphics for a film is to do something that’s visually interesting, conveys the message,
and is plausible — those are my three big things.”
In the comedy Anchorman II, challenges common to Todd’s job are especially clear.
The comedy’s set in the early 1980s at the dawn of cable.
“We’re starting a 24 hour news channel. GNN, the global news network.”
“That is without a doubt the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
That meant there were tons of old TVs in the background — each of which had to be period
appropriate physically and display something period appropriate, too.
They filmed a lot of the footage on their own, because the easiest way to get something
that looked like it was from the 80s was to make it.
“OK, what’s gonna go on this screen, what’s gonna go on that screen, and what’s happening...
Will Ferrell is coming into the studio, so we’re not on air yet. What’s on the screens
then?” In this case, Todd had to plan — a lot.
This chart is typical of how a playback supervisor would need to plan for a busy shoot. It breaks
down the necessary shots. Ron smokes crack on air? There’s a neatly
ordered cell in the spreadsheet to get everything necessary for the shot.
Other documents carry more specifics. When Ron and the team meet their new co-worker,
Linda Jackson, Todd had a list of exactly what background
elements were necessary, like the three wall TVs.
That planning allows big gags to work without a hitch.
When idiot weatherman Brick, played by Steve Carrell, went in front of a green screen in
green pants, it was clear the scene would work better if Todd and his team made the
effect happen live. “It wasn’t that tricky. But the production
hadn’t really planned on doing it live, and we were like, no, we’re doing this live,
and they were like, ‘Oh, great.’” The result of all that is
“AAAHHHHH.” In Team America, planning meant finding the
perfect tiny LCD screens for Kim Jong Il’s palace.
“The smaller scale there’s little 7 inch screens right there, 7.5 inch screens, and
you can see me, I had to like lean in without falling into the set.”
In the comedy, The Internship, which was set at Google, it meant finding the right giant
screens for corporate presentations. But these screens aren’t only important
details. Sometimes, they can be a key turning point for a story.
“With Date Night, in that particular scene with Mark Wahlberg, he was
a high tech security expert.” Now you might not expect Date Night to include
a technically driven moment. It’’s a very light 2010 comedy.
But Todd’s work in this scene is crucial to landing one of the movie’s best jokes.
In it, Mark Wahlberg parodies a trope of over-the-top action movie computer stuff. It ends up being
pretty funny — and that joke required a lot of work.
“Sp then we have to create a whole logic to the thing and kind of map out what we want
to do.” One silly gag required elaborate mockups,
rejected concepts, and designs to perfectly sync the digitally
inserted screen with the practical side units on the wall.
You might not be looking for a coherent user interface design in Date Night. But see how
they bothered with the color of that circular control? The filmmakers cared because it was
key to making the joke work. That attention to design was important in
a different way in the period piece Steve Jobs,
which was about design, computers, and presentation — basically everything someone like Todd
cares about. “As far as the challenges, there were so
many challenges involved in that project.”
Challenges like making computers from 1984 look new again.
“You could put the old Macs apart and put this paste on them, and leave them out in
the sun and bleach the plastics.” ...Or finding the perfect build of blueberry
iMac. These details were key to making the movie — and the movie’s emotions — feel
real. One of the most touching scenes in the movie
is when Steve Jobs connects with his daughter over a new computer. The character is normally
distant, but he’s able to be more open and warm because of software. And in the movie,
they didn’t fake it. “That was a Macintosh, and that was a special
one. John, our engineer, had actually built a special video card for that one.”
“Push that key and the S at the same time.” “And we had to load everything off of floppies.”
“Now type your name.”
“The artwork was created by our artist in Photoshop, so now we had to figure out how
to get this Photoshop file back down to a 400k floppy.”
“Do you know which box is save?”
“it was really booting off the real Macintosh software. You know, it’s craziness!”
“If there’s something that the actor can act against, it’s much better...it’s better
for the director, it’s better for timing when things are cued and when people can respond.
It’s better for the editors, because they have something to edit against, versus trying
to cut to something that’s not there. It just makes the whole process smoother, even
if there’s something that needs to be changed later and they have to burn it in later, which
sometimes happens.”
That makes it worth the difficulty and the stress, worth doing live instead of after
the fact. The gimmick in The Net was
a hidden backdoor that basically unlocks the internet.
“You click on the little Pi symbol while you’re holding this key, and then you get
into that, which again was pretty ridiculous — at least it moved the story forward and
didn’t pull you out.” The idea’s implausible, but kind of compelling:
there is a whole world, tucked in the bottom right of a screen somewhere, hiding in plain
view. That’s how movies build worlds. With obsessed
over details that make it easier to produce and see emotion, because there aren’t any
distractions. Because the world feels real. To see it, you have to take the time to
search for it. “This picture is of when I worked on Star
Trek Nemesis. And that’s the little ship, the plaques they have on the bridge, and it
has a lot of names of people who worked on the movie, so I’m in there.”