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I watched the Old Guard last night. It is a great movie but one thing it about it is a recurring bugbear of mine.

Badly 'photoshopped' photographs of one of the characters from days gone by e.g. the hero captured on camera in the America Civil War.

A lot of the time it looks as if the film makers have taken a genuine photograph and badly fudged the protagonists face onto one of the subjects.

Which raises two questions, the first of which I think I know the answer to but maybe not.

Why not just get the actors dressed up for the scene? I am guessing it could be a cost saving measure.

Why do they do such a poor job of it? At our company I have seen one of our media officers seamlessly insert extra people into a group shot. He took three sets of photographs at three different campuses on different days. The composite image looks perfect to the naked eye.

And yet I keep seeing 'old timey photos' that don't match the original shot at all.

Is it a thing? Has doing such obvious fakes become an in-joke like the Wilheim Scream?

Partly, it is how all props are. If you ever see actual movie props in person, they look pretty bad. Professional lighting and cinematography, and the whole general context, are what make them look convincing on film.

Partly it’s because there’s no need to make it convincingly flawless. The audience knows the photo is fake. Even if they went back in time and took an actual old times photo, the audience would still “know” it was fake, see it as fake. Dressing everyone up, getting the crew and the set ready, and paying the actors for a day’s work for one photo isn’t cost effective. Better to get the point across and move on.

Pretty much, alot of props are made just "Good Enough" to look convincing at a glance or casual view.

I also wonder if you made it too good people wouldn’t actually notice what it was; sometimes you need that subconscious “something ain’t right” reaction to draw people’s attention.

Some may also be rush jobs, a director might decide he needs so-and-so to moon over a photo in the next scene and the photo shop guy has 2 hours to make something good enough.

Scripts are bascialy starting points and actors and directors can insert stuff all the time. Adding a location requires a lot of work but asking for another prop for a planned scene is pretty easy.