There was a great YouTube video here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-cAnFbEXY0) - but it seems to have been removed by the user. Not sure if there's any way to find it now. It was Americans speaking gibberish, and it sounded pretty convincingly like language.
Indeed. Folks seem unbelievably harsh on accents they know not to be the native one, which is every time a famous actor does an accent, but all those no-names doing even not very good ones fly straight under their radar, making me highly skeptical it's not just confirmation bias.
Christian Bale often keeps his American accents for interviews and press. There might be something in that...
I've read several places[1] that the producers and/or director of the show didn't realize that Richard Coyle (Jeff Murdoch on Coupling) wasn't Welsh until the second season of that show.
Great example, and I believe complementary to my observation. If talk show interviews are to be believed then when Hugh Laurie began on House he wasn't famous in America, and most people didn't have any idea he was British. The show was a hit, everyone loved him, and then it's far too late for anyone to erroneously pick apart his flawless accent.
It's almost impossible to imagine, but if Hugh Laurie had been popular in America, and his natural voice widely known, then the reception to that series could have been very different, purely from unfounded criticism of the accent. And if this is starting to sound a little far-fetched, let's not forget it all began with someone saying "British actors trying to do American accents, which never fool me".
Well... I knew he was British, as did some of the people I know that watched the show, and it really didn't have any impact on how we watched it (at least, nothing we noticed ourselves noticing).
When I've been aware of it, it's never been convincing — but of course you're right; if I'm unaware of it and it did fool me, I wouldn't know. Let's amend the above to "which usually don't fool me."
A similar effect happens with CGI. Most (tech savvy) people think that they can smell CGI from a mile away, but the vast majority of CGI these days is subtle and mundane (put another helicopter in the background there; we didn't have budget to rent two), and slips right by unnoticed. It's when the CGI is something obviously impossible and also the focus of a scene that viewers actually notice.
> Most (tech savvy) people think that they can smell CGI from a mile away
This is dependent on how much physics is going on in the scene, and how good the person's intuitive sense of physics is. I think a lot of that's been damaged by seeing bad CGI in films. One disturbing thing I've noticed is that before widespread CGI, animator's sense of physics seemed to be getting better as animation technique developed. Now, it seems to be getting worse.
But besides the various problems, the physics of the bird is just flat-out wrong. When birds of prey snatch something off the ground, they are relying on having enough momentum, such that after the snatch, they still have forward motion to maintain airspeed. The portrayed bird in the video doesn't have any forward motion just after the snatch. No forward motion means no lift. There's nothing holding it up. The flapping wings are horizontally oriented and flapping vertically, so they're primarily thrusting forwards. (Birds with little to no forward motion can flap their wings to thrust away from the ground, but then their wings are oriented vertically, and the flapping is horizontal.) I can only assume the animators think "levitation rays" come off the bottom of the wings.
That's egregious, but it's what passes for "good" CG nowadays. Then you have the totally execrable stuff in Hollywood blockbusters. (Star Wars ep. 1-3)
Grossly exaggerated physics in movies are nothing new though. Before CGI, explosions were still silly puffy balls of fire, and people still survived them by jumping away from them in slow motion.
And before CGI, hoaxes were still terrible, yet people bought into them. I mean, look at the Cottingley Fairies from the early 20th century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies. The bar for fooling laymen just isn't that high, and never has been.
As for Hollywood blockbusters, it really varies a lot from movie to movie. Also, the Star Wars prequels are nearly 8-14 years old, so they're not the greatest examples of modern CGI.
Really never, or do you just never notice?
There was a great YouTube video here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-cAnFbEXY0) - but it seems to have been removed by the user. Not sure if there's any way to find it now. It was Americans speaking gibberish, and it sounded pretty convincingly like language.