• The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.worldOPM
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      18 days ago

      They used real human skeletons because it was cheaper to pick them up from medical suppliers.

      The actors, including JoBeth Williams (pictured) weren’t informed that they were interacting with genuine human remains until filming wrapped.

      • CosmicTurtle0 [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        18 days ago

        The crazy thing is that this isn’t limited to human remains.

        Fake cameras often cost more than actual cameras. Fake food is more expensive than real food, which is then wasted.

        • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          Fake food is often designed to survive heat from sets and lights. Filming for ads is different than filming movies, but the same idea applies. They also make low-sound versions of things like paper bags as to not ruin takes when things get carried by actors, moved around, or dragged on the set floor.

        • Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works
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          18 days ago

          Using fake firearms is more expensive than using real ones with blanks, using real money is often cheaper than fake Hollywood money

        • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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          18 days ago

          It always pissed me off how in the Big Bang Theory, you always see them with food, but you never see them eat. I can probably count on one hand the number of times in the whole series someone actually takes a bite off camera.

          I hope the crew got to eat all the stuff they never touched on camera, cause that shit always looked good. I got so many cravings watching that…

          • starik@lemmy.zipBanned
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            18 days ago

            Actors will try to avoid eating in scenes, because if they end up having to do multiple takes, they have to take a bite of the food at the same point in the scene every take for continuity reasons. This can result in them getting sick of the food quickly.

            • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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              17 days ago

              Not me, if I was acting in a food scene and we had to do multiple takes, the viewers would notice my plate suddenly getting emptier every few seconds

      • Ariselas@piefed.ca
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        18 days ago

        Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland also used medical skeletons. It wasn’t that long ago that they were really easy to purchase, a couple instructors at my university had full skeletons and would bring them in for class. I wanted to buy one just to keep in my closet as a joke, but beer came first.

        • ZeldaFreak@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          In Germany a school recently held a funeral for their school skeleton, which was an actual human. They suspected that this was a young Indian man. Up to the 20th century, you could easily buy a dead person from India. There are still schools with actual human remains.

          • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
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            17 days ago

            I plan on donating my me to a school with human remains, for dissection in their cadaver lab. Afters, composting. Probably won’t happen, but we’re gonna try

            • Ariselas@piefed.ca
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              17 days ago

              It was pretty common up till the 60s and maybe later to get human skeletons form South Asia, they were often obtained from flood or landslide victims, and have no identifiers except maybe an inventory number.

              Modern stuff however, is obtained when someone donates their remains, and is often only held for a limited time before interred. They are anonymized to the student / researcher, but there is a record of who they were. The med school’s anatomy lab here has some pretty neat stuff (or did 20 years ago when I went), including a woman’s plasticized torso that had been sliced into 1 inch wafers, and an autopsied man who was born with his organs rotated in his body so that everything was on the wrong side. I still have the illustrations I drew from that anatomy class somewhere.

              • VinegarChunks@lemmus.org
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                17 days ago

                I’ve heard that modern cadavers donated for medical research are treated with a high degree of respect and appreciation, which I’m guessing is probably a reaction to the way things used to be.

            • PieMePlenty@lemmy.world
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              17 days ago

              It may have been a donation. Donating your body to science can result in you becoming a classroom skeleton, or blown up in the sky with a rocket. If you’re lucky enough, they put you in a field and let your body rot, while observing the process. You don’t really get a say in it, but cadavers are used for all sorts of things.

      • UnspecificGravity@piefed.social
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        18 days ago

        The more interesting tidbit is that this is actually pretty common. The prop house using real skeletons was actually pretty common and not unique to this production. The notable thing about this film was the sheer number of skeletons that they used, so they basically scooped up everything that was out there, and how much the live actors actually interacted with the skeletons. It wasn’t particularly unusual for skeletons to be used as props.

        Really, just about any time you saw a skeleton on screen before the 90s or so, it was probably real. A lot of real world props and decorations also used real skeletons, sometimes to the surprise of the people using them. For example, if you rode the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney Land, you saw real human skeletons.

        • tmyakal@infosec.pub
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          18 days ago

          Don’t leave it all on Tobe. Depending on how recently you’ve asked him, Spielberg directed none, some, most, or all of this movie.

      • bss03@infosec.pub
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        18 days ago

        I don’t think that’s 100% true. The guy that famously (posthumously) plays Yorick ('s skull) is not anonymous. (I just have problems with remembering names.)

        Also, posthumous organ donation isn’t necessarily anonymous.

  • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club
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    18 days ago

    It’s eco friendly, fully biodegradable, and (technically) abundant.

    Honestly we should be weary cuddling up to plastic.
    (I don’t actually remember - they prob used the bones & still covered them in masks & whatnots?)

  • Yosmonkol@piefed.social
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    17 days ago

    If you like to research the macabre, look up Elmer McCurdy, a veteran turned outlaw that was mummified and used as a side show prop for roughly 50 years. His remains weren’t burried until the 70s.