It used to be common practice to show characters on TV and in movies smoking. For no good reason. You see it less today, but as a writer's tool it's brilliant: You get a character to walk into a scene, and light up a cigarette. Or maybe ask someone for a light. Fifteen to 30 seconds blown, easy, and if you're going for mood, you can stretch it to minutes...

Nowadays when you need to kill 15 to 30 seconds, it seems that one of the less medically controversial crutches writers rely on is the UI filler.

You know, where  a bunch of characters stand around a wickedly awesome high-tech interface to track down a spy on the other side of the planet or get a hit in the fingerprint database. Or when it's less well-used, like in this awesome example from CSI New York in which one of the characters claims to be able to use "use visual basic to track the killer's ip address." 

Um, yeah. Okay. One of the writers was either having some fun that day or they just googled some nonsense.

Ok, I stand corrected. It's completely possible apparently.

The impetus for this post started last night while I was watching the CBC's Nature of Things documentary "Changing Your Mind".

The visual was this one - a spinning "digital scan of brain" thing. The used it repeatedly through the show whenever they needed a convenient setup shot for the important science. The two brains on the screen spun around while MRI-like color filter effects were applied on a black background. As the brain was being "scanned", scrolling text (at bottom) appeared while a Star Trek Tricorder scanning sound was played to make it all seem high-tech.

Not to take anything away from Mr. Suzuki's excellent show (big fan, here, really big fan), but I know that it wasn't really an actual brain scan at all.

I know because the text at the bottom of the image was just html and javascript for some web page. At one point i saw the words "Canada" and "Film" go by.

I never would have noticed, probably, if i hadn't been sitting too close to the screen.

Okay, so clearly these visual UI designers for shows are having some fun with the audience occasionally. But in this case, the visual certainly lined up with the archetype i have in my head for a "brain scan", and I'm hazarding a guess that it probably lines up with most people's view as well.

So when done well, and when they align with the audience's knowledge of computer interfaces, these visuals can enhance the storyline in fictional plots, and make the science go down a little easier in documentaries. But done poorly, they seem like meaningless filler or technobabble.

But the fact that TV is using interfaces as a bread and butter method of moving a story along recognizes that the audience has become increasingly comfortable with computers and user interfaces, so much so, that these special effects, when done well, go almost unnoticed and fade into the subliminal background of your tv-watching vegetative state.

It must be a fascinating design challenge, though, to find the balance of enough fidelity to  make the visuals look cool (or at least not stupid) and also fill in the appropriate blanks to let the characters tell the story.

But what happens when your audience's understanding of technology changes over time? Much YouTube silliness:

Seems like really nice work for a UI designer if you can get it though. What other job would give you free reign to work on experimental interfaces that just have to work for the few seconds it's on screen?