“Police stuff, for instance, is something you’ve got to be careful with,” says Bilson. “If it’s too real, you’ll have issues.” For this reason, prop houses make themselves accessible only to “bona fide motion picture entities,” which must have $1 million insurance policies on file to merely rent out something as simple as a ten-dollar police badge.
Alarmingly true. I was cast as a prison guard once for a film which was being shot in a recently decommissioned jail. I used to smoke then, and every time I went outside someone would come up and ask me about visiting hours or some other prison-related question. I thought the outfit was obviously fake but most people don't look at the writing on the shoulder patches or the exact kind of badge someone is wearing as long as you're in a uniform and have the relevant props.
It doesn't surprise me at all that people would attempt to spend fake money. I've seen people try to spend bills that were obviously made on an inkjet printer.
I've seen people try to spend bills that were obviously made on an inkjet printer.
Sadly, I've seen people that worked for the family owned bar accept bills that were obviously made on an inkjet printer. High rag content paper feels like real money and in dim light with an element of urgency (lots of people waiting for a drink) it's sometimes easy to miss.
Then there are those "magic pens" which are supposed to detect fake bills but actually just detect low quality (high starch) paper. James Randi, in his wild, younger days, would spray real bills with spray starch to cause a little chaos at the bank.
> James Randi, in his wild, younger days, would spray real bills with spray starch to cause a little chaos at the bank.
Terrifyingly devious while causing no physical harm. I wonder if pranksters these days are just as imaginative. Or perhaps the environment is less conducive toward appropriate penalties.
There’s also the potential that those people are in on it, attempting to launder money - “cheap drink, $20 counterfeit, $17 in real currency as change"
May day job is doing sound for film, but I work in the indie film world so that means being able to wear a lot of hats. Related the sound thing I also sometimes write code for DSP or digital asset management, but more on an ad-hoc than a product basis. Films have a lot in common with startups, and film production requires a lot of McGyver-type hacking and increasingly, good computer skills.
^ This. The overlap is extremely high, and most of the time, the budget (read: VC) is much, much higher and the timeline is way faster for realizing the bulk of the return on investment. Shark tank my ass, try film. :)
Can't wait to see fake hollywood bitcoins in the movies. I'm sure they'll just 'cat /dev/urandom' for awhile and call it good.
My assumption based on the title was the article would be a discussion about hollywood accounting where numbers are manipulated until only the studio wins. I was pleasantly surprised to read about fake currency.
The writers of that show take is as a challenge to come up with ludicrous technobabble that fools laymen but causes geeks to bite through their keyboards.
My father is a big fan. I saw some "enhance" sequence once and decided no thanks. I was at his house and this episode came on. cringe It seems like there should be a reasonable middle ground between NCIS and reality. Sneakers was pretty good. :)
Also The Net, Antitrust and David Fincher's Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have very realistic computer sequences.
Antitrust and Social Network also show real source code that compiles (C, Java, Perl, Bash, HTML), Antitrust even explains "Open Source" to the audience. The camera work (especially showing relevant parts of the computer monitors and pan around to keep it engaging for a longer time) on all four movies is really fantastic.
* The Net (1995) - filmed one year before the World Wide Web got traction with the first fully graphical Mosaic web browser: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
* Antitrust (2001) - famous for highlighting the open source movement, features a "CEO" that resembles a mixture of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in one person as evil character, shows Linux desktop and command shell, and shows real Linux developer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
* Social Network (2010) - very realistic, based on real detailed technical blog posts from 2004 on LiveJournal from Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin's memory: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/
Hollywood has gotten better about faking technology. At least some people in Hollywood have. "Silicon Valley" on HBO went as far as having a Stanford CS professor develop a viable compression-rating system to be used on the show (the "Weissman Score," named for Professor Tsachy Weissman).
I've been really impressed by the TV show Halt And Catch Fire in this regard, the sales guy is slightly incorrect as a sales guy would be, but the engineers are bang-on.
The first two seasons of Alias were pretty ok regarding the use of computers. Granted, they still did impossible (highly advanced) stuff with them but it looked plausible. But after season 2 they jumped the shark in all regards.
The most interesting part of that is the line where people need to agree to follow Hollywood accounting as part of the contract and actors have a large incentive to 'exaggerate' their income.
Still, I suspect a more honest studio could quickly gain a lot of traction.
"Honesty" is a logistical headache when it comes to recorded performances. Imagine, before digital distribution, tracking every movie ticket, every rental, every purchase (don't forget discounts like matinée tickets, coupons, clearance, etc), every clip used where royalties are due, etc ... and paying royalties to every face in your movie, at various rates depending on screen time or 'voice' time...
As the talent, it's just easier to demand a large payment up front and just forget about the royalties. As the studio, it's easier just to pay that amount up front. Then, magic voodoo accounting and poof any statutory royalties are eliminated.
I suppose in this case, the "honest" studio is negotiating that large up-front payment to its talent rather than trying to sell the talent on the eternal royalties that never come.
Maybe that's why these days actors demand a % of the profits:
"Bullock's deal with Warner Bros. for the Alfonso Cuaron-directed space epic calls for her to earn $20 million upfront against 15 percent of first-dollar gross. "
USD $70 million
USD $50 million for Robert Downey Jr. on Iron Man 3
There seem to be a lot of possibilities that would do in various positions.
If you could make the money feel distinctively different, while appearing the same, it would probably be enough to cause a receiver to pay sufficient attention to notice the minor differences.
Printing different denominations on each side of the bill would be sufficient for most stationary money.
For scenes with large amounts of free flowing money, you could print the notes backwards and flip the film.
I don't think there would be any single solution for all instances, but I think you could pick a form that would suit whichever scene you were currently shooting.
For scenes with large amounts of free flowing money, you could print the notes backwards and flip the film.
Unfortunately this is usually going to require flipping the actor, creating an even worse problem. A man wearing a suit, for example, will suddenly have his jacket buttoned right-over-left rather than left-over-right, wristwatches and jewelry will appear on the wrong hands, and so on.
Of course, mistakes like this show up in movies all the time, but it's professionally embarrassing and would reflect badly on someone if it was a regular issue in their work.
Different denominations seems like the best solution, but that's still a problem waiting to happen to the unwary art director/continuity supervisor.
"Unfortunately this is usually going to require flipping the actor, creating an even worse problem."
No legal problem, though, I think. As making stuff continues to get easier, this solution gets better, though probably still not practical. And of course as making stuff gets easier we'll eventually need a different kind of approach to counterfeiting.
Appearance of money on film isn't usually a legal problem for the production company, though. The filmmakers and the prop owners don't necessarily have the same priorities - if it cost the film more to rent authentic-looking cash for whatever reason, that's just a line item in the budget. It can even be worth hiring the real cash at a premium because the armored truck, hawk-eyed security guards, on-set audits etc. may be worth it in marketing terms.
Sure. Though many of the things needing reflection would also be props, and if the Secret Service were sufficiently interested in cracking down that mirroring or real cash were the only real options, mirroring would itself be "just a line item" to be compared with the other. Like I said, though, probably not actually practical.
Color correction, on the other hand, might be a practical approach...
I can definitely see potential in the color correction idea, but usually that involves keying ona fairly narrow range of color so I don't know how it would hold up under a wide variety of lighting conditions - although it's not like you're scattering money in every scene unless it's a very very bad heist movie XD
I have a colorist friend that does a lot of mega-budget projects so I'll drop him a line and ask...although I suspect his answer will be 'anything's possible if you're willing to write a large enough check.'
>According to the Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992, a reproduced bill must be: a.) either less than 75% or more than 150% the size of a real bill, b.) one-sided, and c.) made with only one color (so as to discourage the reproduction of identifying factors).
If you're saying that a flipped bill may still be illegal, I'll grant that. What I was saying is that flipping the other stuff does not present a legal problem (or at least not any that I can imagine).
Plus, people look totally different mirrored from left to right. Can you imagine Marilyn Monroe's famous beauty mark or Leonard Nimoy's arched eyebrow on the wrong side?
"Plus, people look totally different mirrored from left to right."
Less so celebrities, in general, though still the case... But anywhere you could swap in a stunt double you could almost certainly get away with mirroring the person.
We're all inherently working within the movie/prop company's framework while brainstorming fake money ideas. The prop company has two goals:
1. Make something convincing on camera.
2. Make something readily distinguishable from real money.
They've already succeeded! New solutions may be fun, but it's still reinventing the wheel in the end. (Which may explain why programmers are falling over themselves to do it...) But there are two extra constraints that Hollywood isn't meeting with some of their current solutions:
3. Make something which meets Federal laws for fake money.
4. Make something which could not be passed ever.
3&4 are potentially the same, in that 3 is written to try to achieve 4, but I think it's important to note that Hollywood is (or was, until the recent innovations mentioned at the end of the article) failing at.
I don't think most of the solutions suggested in this thread actually solve 4. I think mirrored, cut in half, and even bills with 'FAKE' printed across the middle could still be passed with a fair success rate, and moreover a criminal could laugh it off as a mistake if they were caught.
So what couldn't be passed, aside from the absurdly large/small bills the Feds want, or the glued together blocks used now?
Well, once it's banded it becomes much easier anyways. A stack of 20s costs 40 dollars, because your interior bills can look as fake as you like - just use real ones on the external faces.
"a movie set in the 1920s, to provide bills from that era. Elyea adds that it’s “hard for production companies to liquidate assets after the film or television series,” so they choose to rent cash out instead of purchasing it at face value."
So Hollywood can generate realistic looking footage of 50 foot high humanoid robots fighting each other in downtown Hong Kong, but it can't digitally correct some orange dollar bills to make them appear green?
The movies with giant robots tend to have vastly higher budgets than the ones involving suitcases of money, although these days 'invisible' FX are the norm even on lower budget projects.
But I think it's more to do with departmental splits. ie if you're the prop guy and you turn up with a pile of orange money saying 'just CG it' then you're offloading part of your job onto a different department and messing up their budget, which is a big no-no. Producers always prefer the person who makes things simpler over the person who makes them more complicated.
Bear in mind that the majority of people work together on a per-project basis so organizationally film production is more fragmented than you might expect. Even on big productions you typically don't know many of the people you are working with at the start of a project and you only meet each other a few days or weeks before shooting starts. Like any other organization, different departments guard their budget allocations jealously.
When I had seen 50 foot humanoid robots on film they were everything but realistic, also the fact that you don't know how a 50 foot robot really behaves helps a lot. Normally they hide the problems using light, making it dark, like a night scene.
Making video realistic with bright light is really really hard and really really expensive because in the real world there is dust and rust, and dirty mud and imperfections everywhere, but those are hard to model.
Even then most film professionals will know instantly is something is created digitally. It is exponentially more expensive to improve in this area, so they compromise on what most people would consider ok for the least price.
Even super expensive productions like Starwars look very artificial for the trained eye.
Is it really cheaper to hire CGI artists to recolor stray bills in every frame rather than to hire two security guards to guard and re-count a pile of real cash?
Sure, handling piles of real cash is a bit tricky - but it's a well-practiced routine that is a cheap&efficient commodity, since so many businesses need it for their everyday operations.
My sister used to work for a Prop studio, and one Christmas she gave various members of the family fake $100 bills. They said very clearly "For Motion Picture use Only" on them, and it was quite obviously not a real $100 bill. My brother jokingly decided to give it to a cashier who then proceeded to start counting change. Embarrassed, he had to explain to them that it was all a joke, and the money was fake.
The bar for being a cashier isn't all that high. I bought a gift card at an IKEA in Shanghai for 100元 (about $16). IKEA's web site seemed to indicate that their gift cards couldn't be used across countries, but I took it to a cashier at a store in California to see if that was true. The cashier happily informed me that my card was loaded with 100 dollars. When I expressed surprise, she gave me a receipt that correctly showed 100 CNY.
A cut bill is perfectly valid at least in Europe and I suspect in the US is the same as there are movies in which the Big gangster cuts a money bill and tells someone else if he wants the other part do something.
Yes. If you have both halves of the bill a bank will exchange it for another one. Even if you're missing a part of it. US bills have two serial numbers; generally you need one whole serial number and part of the second. (Obviously so you can't cut it in half and try to exchange each half separately.)
The fake money already has a bunch of features that make it clear that it's fake if you actually look at it. Cutting it in half could work, because it'd break the routine of the person accepting it and make them pay attention.
One solution nobody has mentioned is filming in another country. While there probably are laws restricting the "foreign" currency reproductions, I'd think it's unlikely the authorities in, say, Canada would spend nearly as much effort going after prop US currency as the Secret Service would in The States.
Canada might. They're pretty tight with the US, and fake US currency is still a diplomatic problem for them. Film in Iran, however, and they probably wouldn't care at all.
Yeah, agreed. Plenty of places will accept US currency at par with Canadian, and many cashiers have no idea how to check if the money is genuine, if they check at all.
A flood of fake US $20s in Vancouver could really screw people over.
Odds are that it will be blank by the time you're ready to shoot it :-) Film production can be sloooow, it's easy to spend hours adjusting the lighting for every scene and then you have multiples camera setups within each scene and multiple takes for every setup....
I was imagining something that would oxidize quickly. If you could make it cheaply and vacuum/nitrogen pack it, you could have as much as you wanted on hand. But, yeah, could easily be an added source of stress.
"That was perfect!"
"What about the money? It looks faded. Is that faded?"
Alarmingly true. I was cast as a prison guard once for a film which was being shot in a recently decommissioned jail. I used to smoke then, and every time I went outside someone would come up and ask me about visiting hours or some other prison-related question. I thought the outfit was obviously fake but most people don't look at the writing on the shoulder patches or the exact kind of badge someone is wearing as long as you're in a uniform and have the relevant props.
It doesn't surprise me at all that people would attempt to spend fake money. I've seen people try to spend bills that were obviously made on an inkjet printer.