I've blogged before about their love of the four clicks of an 1873 Colt.
This time, I want to rant about cameras. A TV show had scene with a news conference. The sound clowns added the clicking of camera mirrors (OK), the sound of shutters (not KO) and the sound of motor drives (also not OK). Professional news photographers made the switch to digital as soon as the technology was practical. Newspapers loved that they could get rid of their darkrooms (sometimes letting nursing mothers use them for breast-pumping).
I'm somewhat surprised they don't add the sound of steam locomotives to railroad scenes.
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Yep, it's like we've all come to expect that you can hear the scream of Red-tailed Hawk in every desert and desolate place anywhere in the world. And horses sound like coconuts.
-- https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect
My personal favorite is that all jungles are a-roar with gibbering monkeys ... which are actually in fact birds
-- https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JunglesSoundLikeKookaburras
Then there's the airplane sound in Airplane!..;-)
And rifles always echo.
"And rifles always echo."
And ricochet!
And fire an inconvenient number of times...
And suppressed centerfire rifles sound no louder than a cough.
Damn it, Comrade...you sent me off down another rabbit hole with the suppressed revolver comment! A neat one, but still...
To be fair, there *are* digital cameras that emulate the sounds of film cameras because people just expect cameras to sound that way. But they aren't in the hands of professional photographers.
WWII documentaries mean full employment for Foley artists. Since they were nearly all shot with silent Bellow-and-Howl 16mm cameras every gunshot, ricochet, grenade blast and MG burst had to be the artist's work.
People learn a lot from teevee and the flickers-no hearing or eye protection needed, silencer on a revolver, hold it sideways to be more thuggishly threatening, dodging a bullet, unlimited ammo.
Tod, I notice an interesting side effect. When reporters interview witnesses after a shooting, you often hear "I heard a bang, but it didn't sound like a gun." What they mean is, it didn't sound like a movie gun.
Interestingly, I grew up around guns and shooting, but I often mis-recognize gunshots that I hear in the city because I'm used to hearing them out in the hills and mountains where there's an echo. Just a "Boom" without the trailing "ooooooom" as it echos between the hills cause a pause, "what was that?" before I say "Oh, it was a gunshot" and wonder whether I should be hitting the deck or moving to the back of the house where hopefully any gunshots have more walls and furniture to go through.
Uhm, yeah, there was a drive-by in front of my house. I misidentified it as a pistol shot from a .357, it was actually a shotgun blast but between the attenuation from my windows and the lack of echo I didn't identify it as such.
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