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March 30

Babies and little children crying in films

How do they ethically film scenes where babies and little children are crying? — Preceding unsigned comment added by XPPaul (talk • contribs) 05:03, 30 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

How do they ethically film scenes where babies are raped? How do they even do it at all? 92.80.58.90 (talk) 07:57, 30 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There are several methods:

1) For babies and children too young to act, they go for volume. That is, they have a nursery full of babies which look roughly alike, so that one of them is likely to be crying, one laughing, one sleeping, one nursing, and one crawling, at any given moment. Depending on what they want, they grab the appropriate baby.

2) A newer method is to use mechanical "babies", which have a small range of motions.

3) They also often will just dub in the previously recorded sound of a baby crying. If you can't see the baby's mouth when it's supposedly crying, this is probably what they did.

4) Bordering unethical behavior would be to take away a toy, or maybe mommy, and thus get the baby to cry. At least they don't stick them with a pin. StuRat (talk) 08:18, 30 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Is this considered an unethical experiment to do nowadays? (Maybe I should ask on the Science Desk.) TresÁrboles (talk) 04:31, 31 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I imagine it would depend on why they are doing it. If it's to train the baby to be more independent, no prob, but, if it's to make money by filming a crying baby, then yes. StuRat (talk) 05:15, 31 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Mythbusters did a segment on taking candy from a baby. Some of the subjects there cried. Is that too mean? HiLo48 (talk) 05:27, 31 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Babies cry often enough, I doubt it's a serious problem. --Colapeninsula (talk) 08:50, 2 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That goes with my point number 1, as obviously you wouldn't want to hold up production while waiting for a single baby to get in the mood for a good cry. StuRat (talk) 05:02, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]