10 TV Moments They Didn't Want You To See
8. The "Phone Screen" Image - House Of Cards
House of Cards received a lot of praise in its first season for being, at the time, one of the most lavish TV shows produced by a streaming service, with a then-unprecedented production quality and degree of attention-to-detail.
However, the first season's finale dropped the ball for a few seconds with an amusingly careless mistake, when roughly 20 minutes into the episode, journalist Zoe Barnes (Kate Mara) receives a text message from Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey).
The close-up shot shows Zoe lifting her phone to the screen as the message is received, but for about two seconds we can see that the phone screen is actually a screenshot. As the phone is lifted up, the orientation flips, confirming it to be a screengrab from the phone's gallery rather than the phone's real home screen.
From a production standpoint, this absolutely makes sense for continuity's sake, but why wouldn't a crew member activate the phone's orientation lock to prevent the image from flipping?
It's all the more strange given that this mistake could've easily been erased by just cutting the first two seconds of the shot.