Sub-Zero

What more technical things in movies really annoy you? For example, one thing that always bothers me are sound designs where the dialogue is really, really low, while all of the other sounds, including the score, are so loud that it practically blasts a person out of their seat. What technical things in movies really annoy you?

MLBFan24

Lens flares

- this is me because I need sunglasses

TheMovieman

Choppy editing for fight sequences. Don't know if it's to cover up for bad choreography or just a director not knowing how to film those scenes.

Inhumans99

I think that choppy editing of things like fight scenes is not quite in the spirit of the question, some folks suck at filming coherent martial arts type fight scenes. However, unless the director deliberately chooses to drown out the dialogue being spoken to the exclusion of all the other sounds in a given scene in a film, that strikes me as something that the film's sound engineers should have caught before the film/show aired or was released to theaters, etc.. The dialogue being impossible to hear unless you crank the sound up to 11 on a scale of 1-10 is also a pet peeve of mine.

I also hate to say this, but I think Lens flare does not technically count because that is a stylistic choice of some directors like Abrams, so love or hate the flare, that is not a technical issue that could be "fixed" in post-production once a film has wrapped principle filming because the director wanted flare in the finished product.

You know what, nevermind, choppy cutaways in action/fight scenes, lens flare, that is in the spirit of the thread. The question was not what technical issues show up in a film that seem to be a mistake (such as the hard to hear dialogue issue), but just what technical parts of a film annoy you. Carry on folks!

Draven

Major day-to-night changes in a scene. Especially when the dialogue is cut so it sounds like one continuous conversation. Like, oh, you stopped talking about that while you waited for the sun to set?

Eddie W

Whenever a scene contains something that is supposed to be a TV broadcast, they use this filter with huge scan lines like old CRT TV's used to have. Modern TV's don't have visible scan lines & haven't for about 20 years. If fact, they look just like this movie that I'm watching. On a TV!

d2cheer

Stupid ass shaky cam.

story

My spouse loathes that I pointed out what ADR is because now she can't not notice it. I'm sure I've missed picking up on it quite a bit but man, there is plenty of atrocious, obvious ADR out there.

GoldenJCJ

The Wilhelm Scream. It’s not clever or Easter eggy anymore. It’s just lazy now.

Decker

Orange & Teal. 👎

Mondo Kane

I'm still bothered that The Wilhelm came out of Buzz Lightyear's mouth There's also a female version of The Wilhelm out there (It sounds like an old witch being strangled) but I only seem to hear it used on zero-budget Horror films these days.

Nick Danger

The YouTube channel Technical Connections did a video about the stock sound for an old ringing telephone with a mechanical bell is the same in every movie, and has been used for decades. He pointed out that the recording has a bad wow (the audio term).

It goes RING-ng-NG-ng-NG-ng-NG-ng-ng.

He's right, and in the past six months I've heard it over and over again, and I can't ignore it now.

Mondo Kane

Another sound that's been around for a hot minute: The (Passing) truck-horn. If a scene takes place near a road, believe me, you HAVE heard it. "Honk...HAAWWNK!" It always somehow changes it's tune on that 2nd honk.

Sub-Zero

Thanks for all of the replies.

Alan Smithee

Stock sound effects always make me laugh- other common ones are of a clay pot breaking and a cat offscreen meowing irritably (me-ROWW!)

William Fuld

Wet streets

Michael Corvin

I get why they wet the streets but once you see it, you can't unsee it. I pointed it out to a friend and he texted me a week or so later, "you suck, all I can look at in shows are the streets." lol

Josh-da-man

The first encounter with a stock sound that I recognized...

Queensryche's "Operation Mindcrime" album opens in a hospital, and there's a woman's voice on the intercom that says "Doctor Davis, telephone, please. Doctor Davis, telephone, please."

After I listened to that album in 1988, I started hearing that everywhere on television. On one of the soap operas my mother watched, it would be in the background of any scene set in a hospital.

Josh-da-man

Oh, here's another one:

555.

Drives me nuts when that's in every fucking phone number on tv or in a movie. Couldn't the phone company have given them a less conspicuous fake number to use?

morriscroy

Portrayals of computer hacking which are entirely wrong at a technical level, typically written by writer(s) who don't know much about hacking nor the technicalities of computers.

"Word salad" explanations of future tech and/or technobabble which doesn't make any technical sense.

Nick Danger

I love good technobabble. Flux capacitors and inertial dampeners and time loops that take exponentially increasing energy to maintain.

I grant them hacking. "Ticka ticka ticka -- I'm in." It advances the plot the same way as having a parking place right in front of the building.

Josh-da-man

Yeah, I have no problem with technobabble on things like Star Trek. It takes place centuries into the future.

Can you imagine how baffling our daily conversations about things like wi-fi networks, 4K, 5G, cloud storage, rebooting the OS and compression algorithms, would seem to people from only a couple of generations ago?

Of course they are going to have technology and knowledge that is completely beyond our current scope. So, hell yes, bring on the inertial dampeners and Heisenberg compensators. They also don't need to hold our hands through all of this fake technology, either. If I'm watching a movie that takes place in the current era, I don't expect them to explain how an iPhone works or who invented it when someone whips one out.

I actually found it kind of cringey how, in the J. J. Abrams Star Trek reboot, they went out of their way to avoid technobabble by having the characters describe things like "a lightning storm... in space!"

Yeah, computer hacking is one of those things... not a lot of people have any idea what it entails, so they just show some guy madly mashing keys while random numbers scroll across a screen or the screen breaks up into digital blocks. The reality is that hacking into a computer system or breaking a code is, in reality, tedious and takes a lot of time and wouldn't be interesting to watch at all.

Diehard, of all things, is probably one of the more accurate examples of forcing into a secure system. It took a lot of time, and we were watching what the other characters were doing while the hacker was doing his thing. (I think; it's been a while since I've watched that movie.)

Coral

Computers in a command center, etc. make all these digital noises all the time for everything they do.
When text scrolls across the screen, or an image pops up or zooms in/out - it's gotta have some of those digital sound effects to remind the audience that these are computers which are currently doing something.

If that were reality, there'd be a high turnover of employees as all that constant noise would drive them to quit.

jpcamb

I can't stand it when movies look like broad daylight but it's supposed to be a night scene. There is literally light outside the window yet it's nearing midnight...

bluetoast