Marine biologist Mike Graham, for example, was giving a lecture to Finding Nemo’s (2004) animators when the director asked him “if there was one thing that the fi lm might get wrong that would really disturb him.” An account of this meeting in Nature shows how Graham’s answer created a predicament for the animators: “Quick as a fl ash, Graham said the most intolerable outrage would be to see kelp — a type of seaweed that only grows in cold waters — depicted in a coral reef. There was an uncomfortable shuffling in the audience. Then a voice from the back called out: ‘Better not go see the movie then.’ But if you check out your video or DVD, you’ll see there is no kelp. After Graham raised his objections, every frond was carefully removed from each scene, at considerable cost.”
Filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s… had to rely on propane tanks to mimic the exhaust coming off a rocket in space. When gas leaves the tank it “curls” as the atmosphere causes it to form vortices. In a vacuum gas does not behave in this manner, so these films were inaccurate in this respect. During production for Deep Impact, Chris Luchini explained this to the propmakers regarding the rocket exhaust as well as the comet ’ s outgassing. Liquid nitrogen helped them get around this problem for the rocket exhaust, but for safety reasons they were unable to utilize this for outgassing jets. When Luchini saw a rough cut of the film he noticed the curling of the gas off these jets. He mentioned this error to a special effects technician who used a CGI wipe effect to remove the curling days before the film’s premiere. Such a fix would have been impossible prior to the development of CGI technologies. Although CGI work can be expensive and difficult, it is often easier and cheaper to fix scientific inaccuracies during postproduction than it would be to struggle with them during production. In this case, they were able to rectify an error days before the release of the film.
Doing early prep work on my scientific review of Transcendence, I came across this amusing anecdote from Lab Coats in Hollywood:
Another clip: