Lawrence puts out a match with his fingers as a showy trick. Someone else tries it, and cries out that it hurts, then asks what the trick is. He replies, "the _trick_, William Potter, is not _minding_ that it hurts."
I would not rule out that he wetted his fingers before doing this trick, and, possibly, timed things correctly to rapidly transfer some water to the wick before his fingers got too hot.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect may be relevant)
:)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noddy_(camera)
It was replaced with a custom-built electronic system which was itself pretty crazy. One of the COWs came up for sale a few years back:
Funny how there are other frames like "Temporary Fault", that the camera can point to to inform the audience if there's a problem.
The Wikipedia page also mentions how they added "Colour" to promote the fact that colour service is available, and how people were choosing to remain in B&W because the licence fee for colour TV is higher. Meanwhile in 2025 I'm still using 1080p instead of 4K monitors because theye're good enough.
I do think a lot of people get obsessed with incremental resolution/sound/network improvements that, in practice, don't really affect the experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75V4ClJZME4
https://www.effectrode.com/knowledge-base/making-of-the-doct...
I can recall in an electronics lab in university, we had just built the first prototype of input and output stages for an amplifier, and hooked it up to a function generator playing a sine wave and probably a simple paper-cone speaker. The system had fairly heavy hyperbolic distortion (as I expected from following along with the textbook)... my lab partner (who up until that point I'd thought of as not especially bright, relative to the standards of the course) listened a bit, grabbed the frequency knob, identified a few pitches, and then started playing the main melody of the Doctor Who theme entirely by ear. (And of course I provided a vocal bass line accompaniment, almost instinctively.)
You might be surprised at just how many modern effects are still practical, not digital.
I've read that the original Fraggle Rock was the last major puppet TV production that didn't use computers to supplement the puppetry by hiding the strings.
I'm sure the newer Fraggle rock and other newer Muppet shows have impressive puppetry but the viewer is further removed from the actual craft since the image is computer enhanced.
My wife and I moonlight as performing magicians. We both love horror movies and when I was a child in the 80s / early 90s I wanted to do sfx makeup and practical fx for a living.
Around the late 90s / early 00s, the movie industry went through this phase where digital vfx / cgi was extremely trendy and hype-driven. Kind of like the LLM hype train in tech today. Movie studios embraced digital vfx to the exclusion of practical for a variety of reasons and with mixed results as far as public reception went. Just like with LLMs, there was this attitude amongst studios and fx shops that digital was "the future." It was driven partly by cost but also by the impression that you can do things digitally that you can't do practically, or can't do as safely or for the same budget.
So during this period we saw a hell of a lot more digital CGI and a hell of a lot less practical.
The state of vfx has matured quite a bit since then, and there has been a modern embrace of practical fx but not for the reasons that people think.
The idea that practical is better than digital is horse shit. But so is the idea that digital is better than practical. Just like with anything, it depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve.
Digital vfx artists are magicians. What they do is not easy. Neither are practical fx artists. Both are highly skilled crafts and disciplines and most movies today use hybrid approaches because it's all about finding the right tool for the job at hand.
What gives a lot of us vfx enthusiasts a laugh, is when studios boast about doing everything practically because of just how much of a bad image the general public has gotten about digital fx.
First, they're almost always lying to you. They undoubtedly do a lot with practical, but there is still a lot of digital vfx going on. But they play fast and loose with what they mean by "digital vfx." Is compositing the same thing as CGI? Not in a strict sense, but it's still an example of a digital effect unless you're filming on film and doing it the old fashioned way.
People have it in their mind that digital is always going to look artificial, and practical is going to "feel" real. Go look at some budget practical fx from the 80s. Some of it is brilliant and has aged well, while others looks absolutely garbage. That's true for digital as well.
The techniques needed to mature, the computers needed to mature and the industry needed to mature. Now a days most people would be surprised how much is done with digital vfx that they wouldn't have realized, because good CGI is invisible CGI. You believe it and don't question it. And amazing results are had when practical and digital are combined. Which, if I can play loose with the term "digital" has actually always been the case since Georges Méliès, a 19th century magician and early film and vfx pioneer, who accomplished a lot of his sfx using a combination of "on camera" practical methods and film compositing (what, pre-CGI, people would call "camera tricks"). A lot of what is done digitally today, takes tricks and concepts that were done by hand with film and lets people do it faster and easier with software.
I was surprised how they did the Logo for Arte a few years ago. https://youtu.be/gEWWo5VCQ6A
Here's the making of:
https://xcancel.com/HuinGuillaume/status/1955301767740096659
(could only find it on X)
The Columbia logo is another one that has been updated over the years. I've seen writes up about refreshing it back when it was an edit bay ruled by tape based playback. Each layer of clouds was on a separate tape all played back in sync to generate the final comp. Further back, it would have been separate film strips.
Is it that, or is it just that they realized that that stuff is easy material for promoting the film, so they just let various media produce free content about it and put stuff on YouTube?
'This Island Earth' is great all by itself if you're into campy early-ish scifi.
When "Universal International" appears on screen, Mike Nelson quips "Doesn't the fact that it's universal make it international?"
The popularity of this post seems to show an innate understanding of the value of investing a lot of thought and effort into creating a piece of art. When you do that, the process of its creation becomes part of the art. There is something incredibly human about creating art like this. We have been doing it for tens of thousands of years. "Wasting" time meticulously carving things out of stone or mixing paint to use on our cave walls. It is an inherently human thing to do.
And yet browsing HN most days gives the impression that many tech folks see that truly as time wasted and instead just want to give some black box a prompt and have "art" spit back out at them. I just don't get it.
The "other" category here is pretty wide though.
There's also something a little sad in that it's just one more artistic work created as an ad. Advertising has been one of the few ways artists have been able to actually make money in this world. So much of the artistic creativity and ingenuity of humanity has been funneled into outputting lies, manipulation, and corporate promotion. I have to wonder what artistic works we'd be able to talk about if these artists were able to make a living creating something other than marketing/propaganda.
I suspect that AI means fewer artists working on ads and it'll probably be a while before companies get sick of just regurgitating the history of artistic talent fed into their models and start employing artists again to make something new.
