Last Friday, I had a photo shoot in my lab, where a firm called Corbis spent the day taking a variety of stock "sciency" photos. It was quite the machine in place, with a crew of about half a dozen, a group of well over 25 extras lounging around, lights angled at beakers full of coloured water (why are they always coloured?), and an atmosphere that I thought was usually only reserved for fashion photography.
Really ironic, since here I was, face to face to poser scientists, whereas 72 hours later, I would have a room full of the real thing.
Anyway, I did ask a few questions out of curiousity, and found out that the photoshoot was one of three locales to be shot over a 2 to 3 day period, where they would hope to create about 600 stock photos. Total cost of the 3 locale session was about $200,000 (yikes), but get this... each photo, each use, would retail in the $600 range. Man, we are in the wrong business folks.
But wait, even better is the movie industry!
The above is an image of a film crew for the movie "Hollow Man 2," which occured in my lab last summer. When I first was asked about doing this in my space, my initial thought was "Cool. Presumably we get compensated for this." Then I found out that it was a sequel of a movie that starred Kevin Bacon, and for some reason, I became more interested (I mean Footloose was one of the movies in my particular era). In some respects, I had the strange urge to go out of my way to introduce myself, and therefore lay claim to officially having the noteworthy one degree of separation of Kevin Bacon.
Yes, I know, very silly. But you know what was really silly? What was really silly was the fact that the first Hollow Man movie had a budget of US$90 million dollars, all the more ironic in that the day the film crew was there, was also the day that GenomeCanada (a major genomics funding agency) announced some competition results. All told, British Columbia was awarded a comparable $82.5 million (although that's Canadian dollars folks), which truth be told, is a lot of money in the public research arena.
Let me try to put this in another perspective. My colleague Brett Finlay, who is down the hall from me, was awarded (with a number of his colleagues), just under $6 million for a project titled "Functional Genomics of Energing Infectious Diseases. This is the same guy who headed the Canadian SARS Vaccine Initiative to such great success, and this is a project that speaks towards progress in the fight against things like SARS and Avian Flu Virus. Yet here he was with what is (my circles) a whack of money, and it all still seemed awfully and inappropriately minor when compared to the hollywood machine.
Oh well, I guess I could say that at least the movie was about science - sort of. Here was some of the scribbling they put on my white board.
Looks like these "humans" may actually spontaneously combust if presented with a flame. By the way, Kevin Bacon wasn't in this particular movie - instead, Christian Slater was in the house, but I didn't get a chance to see him - maybe next time.
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Clearly, colored water in beakers is color-coordinated with the backdrop they want to photoshop it into. And white lab coats go with anything anyway. :D
Humans are only 4% nutella?
That's an average Nutella level. Some people smear it on thick ;-)
Maybe 4% is the nutella content in "poser" scientists. The real thing probably has more.
Hey, you should have seen the movie, and you'd know -- Kevin Bacon was fried in that one.
That's too bad - although since I run a molecular genetics lab, maybe the plot could have had something to do with cloning and bringing back the original Hollow Man. This would be especially cool since you would have to do the experiments starting with invisible tissue, growing invisible cells, pelleting invisible DNA pellets...
Mind you, I haven't done that sort of stuff with Nutella - there's a methodology paper in there somewhere.
I was drawn to your post title because we actually sell t-shirts that say, 'this is what a scientist looks like'... We came up with the idea as a bit of joke, but it's been a surprisingly big seller. I think particularly with the changing face of science, many of us don't 'look' like the stereotype of scientists anymore (especially 'mad scientists'!) and get amazed comments when people find out. It's a shame that movies and the media still promote these tired old cliches.
I hope the 'fake' scientists were still wearing proper safety protection...
colored water photographs better than regular ("clear") water.