The life of a Hollywood scientific advisor

When it comes to adding scientific content to a new blockbuster, the director has a conudrum on their hands. Make it too believable, and the audience might be bored out of their minds, make it too whacky and the audience will hit the stop button and find something else to watch. Otis Kingsman took a look at this year's Naked Scientists Science of the Silver Screen Awards shortlisted nominees and spoke with a real life Hollywood scientific advisor, Erin MacDonald, to see how one goes about making a film that everyone can enjoy! 

Otis - There go the credits. I just finished rewatching our nominated films. I think, before we get on with the prize giving, I'd better find someone who can help us run a critical eye through our selection. One show that has definitely got scientists and science fiction enthusiasts hooked for over 50 years is Star Trek. They've done something right there. And fortunate enough, I have Erin MacDonald on hand, one of the scientific advisors to Star Trek itself. I started off by asking her, "At what stage of movie making is it that a real scientist gets pulled in to help."

Erin - Sometimes I'll have discussions with writers when they have an idea for a film and they just want to bounce some ideas around with like, "Maybe how the engines can work", or maybe, "How the space station could work." But sometimes I get brought in late in the day when they have a draft of a script and they're like, "We'd really like eyes on this as a scientist." It's like this improv philosophy of someone comes to me with some whacky story about time travel and music and sound and space and disastrous space aliens, and my job is not to say, "No that'll never work." My job is to say, "Okay, cool. Let's try to see how we can make that happen."

Otis - Erin tells me that the most important part of her job is ensuring that the audience remains engaged with the cinematic content. That means it can't necessarily be too whacky depending on the film. It might even need to adhere to general scientific principles. In short, there needs to be a set of rules that could mean a lot of work for a really small feature in the show.

Erin - Sometimes we'll build up tons of scientific backbone for the story and then that gets edited down to like one line of dialogue. You just want to make sure that, when they're doing that, it's not interrupting the actual flow and the cadence or anything else like that.

Otis - And sometimes after all of our efforts, it can be best not to mention any of the hard work at all.

Erin - You can look at an episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks, for example, that will have the strange energies that possess the second in command, and then he becomes a God-like creature. As soon as you try to explain it, then you start to lose the audience. A lot of times I say to writers, "Okay, that's really cool. Let's do it. Let's just not explain it."

Otis - Erin says that scientific inaccuracies which tend to throw people off are fairly easily avoided if you take the time to build up a portfolio of the likely audience and understand your genre.

Erin - A lot of it is just the basic knowledge that people have. One that comes to mind is sound and space: everyone knows the tagline, "In space, no one can hear you scream" from 'Alien'. So, anytime you have sound in space, that will pull people out. One where we do break it and it doesn't pull an audience out is the beginning of 'The Martian' The whole inciting incident of 'The Martian' with the big windstorm that's knocking the ship over and blows a satellite dish into Mark Watney, that would never actually happen on Mars because the atmosphere is way too thin to actually physically blow an object like that, but not a lot of people know that and so it doesn't pull them out of the film. Without that, there wouldn't be a story.

Otis - In fact, the audience itself has a huge influence on how much scientific language, fictional or not, is used, along with how scientifically accurate the film needs to be in general.

Erin - With 'Star Trek: Lower Decks', that's an adult comedy audience and so we're not worried much about science at all. My job in that aspect is just to make sure we don't say anything wrong. But then, for example, we also have a show called 'Star Trek: Prodigy', which is aimed at children. For that, it's not just getting the science right, but explaining it in a way that's almost educational.

Otis - It feels strange to think that there are Star Trek shows which go easy on the physics. Now, I'm not a Trekkie, but I do happen to know one. Chris Smith loves all of it. I spoke with him a little earlier to find out why he loves boldly going where no man has gone before.

Chris - One of my fondest memories as a child was being taken to see 'The Wrath of Kahn' at the cinema by my dad. It was actually one of the first times I'd ever been to the cinema which made it special, but I just loved that kind of movie. The thing that really makes Star Trek stand the test of time, in my mind, is that those technologies they had in the early days were things we all wanted, but never thought we would have. And now we have: we've got mobile phones, well those were their communicators, we've got iPads and tablets, they have those as well. They had that big screen GPS navigation system, that's in everyone's car these days, and then there are other things like MRI scans to produce those amazing detailed body scans, and the enterprise even had smart speakers. And here we are today talking to our Alexa and Google devices in the same way that people in 'The Next Generation' used touch their badge and ask the computer something, and we all rolled our eyes and thought, "Oh yeah, that'll never happen." And here we are. I think it's an amazing series. I will continue to love it to my dying day.

Otis - A true Star Trek fan is our Chris, summing up the scientific plausibilities we see on the TV. But before I hand it all over to Julia and Harry for the final verdict, I wanted to share some more of Erin's wisdom. I had her look over our four nominees and she was quick to point out that each one needs to be approached from a different perspective.

Erin - I love your selection of movies because it really speaks to your attitude here going in as a viewer. For example, when I went into 'Encanto', I was not there to scientifically analyse the plot, but it's really fun to use something like 'Encanto' to teach science or to introduce scientific topics that we haven't seen before. And when you're talking about James Bond and using nanobots, again, that's something that you go into wanting to watch an action film, and James Bond has that long legacy of weird, cool technical devices, so you're more willing to let those things go. When it comes to 'Don't Look Up', I might go in kind of curious about that asteroid, but I'm really watching it to try to see how people are going to react to an asteroid that's coming to kill the earth. And then, of course, I'm saving the best for last because 'Dune' you go in and you're like, "Oh, this is hard sci-fi. This is science fiction that's really detailed, really thought out. You go in kind of expecting to have your mind blown with new scientific phenomenon or ideas that you might not have had before, but it's really just such a cool way of having us see the potential in our universe.