That Cool Effect They Do These Days
First published 10/21/1999

You know what this column needs? More special effects.

I wish I could do that cool thing they’re doing in all the hip commercials and TV shows and movies these days. You know, where the actors freeze (usually in mid-air, after just having dropped some cards or spilled some milk or something) and the camera pans around them in three dimensions.

It’s a good effect, although it’s starting to become overused. They’re starting to write entire movies around people dropping things, just so they can use this effect as much as possible. Whoops, I dropped my caaaards! Careful, Larry, you’ll spill that juuuuuice! Look out, don’t jump on that bed, float in mid-air, spill some juice and some cards, then throw that plate of spaghetti in the airrrr!

Look at what happened to morphing. At first, it was cool. Then it became commonplace. Now it’s so overused that it’s cheesy. But this column doesn’t even have that level of special effects. If I want to morph a cat into a dog what can I do? Cat. Cot. Cog. Dog. It’s not the same.

I don’t even have a stunt writer -- someone to come in and do the difficult writing for me. I could use one. When it was time for a semicolon or some other bit of difficult grammar, I could just step aside and let the stunt writer navigate through the hard part at breakneck speeds. Then I’d jump back in and pretend it was me writing all along, and hopefully nobody would notice the stunt writer’s sentence was in a slightly different typeface.

If the stunt writer’s passage was particularly difficult, maybe involving some tricky hyphenation, I could show it over and over again from different angles and in slow motion. (I don’t know how slow motion would work; it’d probably involve the use of a lot of commas.)

Maybe I could do a Jackie Chan-type thing and show outtakes of all the grammatical mistakes at the end of the column. You’d see the stunt writer almost crash headlong into a split infinitive before being caught at the last minute by the grammar checker. Yes kids, a smart stunt writer always uses a grammar checker. We only want this to look dangerous.

Oh well. You can’t use special effects in a column, and even if you could I probably wouldn’t have the budget for it. I might as well sit back and drink this juice… whoops! I spilled my…

J

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JUICE!

!ECUIJ

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J

See? It’s just not the same in print.

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