5 Amazing Movie Trick Shots

INTRODUCTION

More often than not seasoned filmmakers watching movies will have a pretty good idea of how most scenes were filmed. However, from time to time there will be a single, dazzling shot which leaves us scratching our head thinking, ‘How exactly was that pulled off?’

Today, I’m going to unpack five of those moments, where creative thinking and technical innovation paired up to create something special.

1 - INVISIBLE REFLECTIONS

One of the earliest movies I remember watching which contained a bunch of unbelievable trick shots, which were done practically - without the aid of computer generated visual effects - was La Haine.

In particular, this mirror shot. The camera starts on the back of our character, slowly tracking in, before he ducks downwards out of frame and pops back up to reveal his face. What makes it a bit confusing is that somehow we see straight into the mirror without picking up the reflection of the camera that should be there.

So, how was this reflective optical illusion pulled off? Well, firstly, this isn’t actually a mirror. It’s a set wall with a hole cut out of it in the shape of a mirror. The actor whose face and performance we will see is placed on the side facing the camera, while a body double is placed with their back against the camera.

The trick to making these shots believable is syncing up the actions of the actor and the body double, so that their movements perfectly match each other. 

Another trick to selling this gag is how the production designer dresses in doubles of all the objects on the counter top: one on each side of the set wall. So we have two hair brushes leaned up against each other, two towels, two pairs of scissors, all carefully placed to create a flipped mirrored perspective.

This practical solution of using a two sided set wall and a body double to mimic the effect of shooting into a mirror has also been used in plenty of other films, whether to create a moment of literal self reflection for the character that removes the camera from the shot, or, even, to show how the character perceives a different version of themself.  

Apart from capturing this effect practically, in camera, it can also be done using visual effects.

For example, in Birdman there are multiple moments which shoot directly into a real mirror, however the camera and operator are nowhere to be seen. This is because they were painted out, or removed with visual effects.

Firstly, they would shoot these over the shoulder shots with a normal mirror and the camera’s reflection in the footage. Visual effects artists would then take the reflection in the mirror and rotoscope the actor - basically cutting them out as a separate, individual layer. 

They would then replace the reflection with an artificially generated 2.5D matte image so that the camera was taken out of the shot, overlay the layer with the actor on top of this background and, finally, add a bunch of mirror textures, smudges or objects on the mirror to help sell this digital illusion.  

Some other productions may also put a green screen on the mirror, shoot a separate reflection plate shot with the actor, then use the same formula of replacing the image in the mirror.

2 - GUST OF WIND

Recreating weather conditions can be tricky and expensive. So, what if, like Andrei Tarkovsky in Mirror, you want to shoot a wide shot and create a gust of wind effect that seemingly out of nowhere sweeps across a field and then disappears almost magically.

Before we get to this more advanced effect we should probably unpack how exactly wind in movies is created. Wind is quite a difficult thing to visualise, because it is invisible to the eye. While we can’t see wind, we can see the effect it has on the environment. 

This is why to make the presence of wind believable filmmakers often rely on two things: one, having objects in frame flap around, such as clothing or bushes, and two, including moving textural elements like leaves or dust which give substance to air.

To do this filmmakers use massive, custom created fans placed just outside the edges of the shot. Sometimes people operating these machines will feed pre-collected dust or leaves in front of them to create that texture we discussed.

What makes any weather effect tricky is that the wider the shot is, the more difficult and expensive it becomes. Whether it’s rain, wind, fog or snow, the wider the composition, the stronger the effect will have to be and the greater physical area it will need to cover.

A dead give away for fake wind without enough area coverage is when the subject is getting blasted in the foreground, but the foliage or trees in the background remain dead still.

Properly selling this effect requires wind machines to be layered at different distances or planes from the camera so that both the foreground, middleground and background of the shot are affected. 

To get a tree in the deep background blasted by wind in The Turin Horse they came up with a creative solution to get gigantic fan blades hitting it from overhead. Instead of a wind machine, they used a helicopter. They communicated over radio to hover the helicopter as low to the tree as possible, without it being framed within the shot.

This created these incredibly believable frames where wind machines blasted characters or leaves in the foreground while a helicopter simultaneously hit the tree in the background with a forceful gust.

Coming back to Mirror, Tarkovsky used the same technique. Hovering a helicopter high above the shot so that the wind didn’t hit the ground, then as the man walked, cueing the pilot to swoop lower and fly directly towards the camera - creating a magical realist gust. 

If you look carefully you can even see the camera start to shake from the wind as the helicopter passes over. Both The Turin Horse and Mirror frame their shots with limited sky or headroom to frame out the helicopter and pull off this effect entirely practically, in camera.

3 - CRANE STEP OFF

Filmmaking is rife with a varied selection of tools that can be used to move the camera. Most of these rigs are designed with one kind of movement in mind, such as dollies, which are built to push along a straight line of track.

However, some filmmakers have taken two different types of rigs with different types of movement and combined them into a single shot with spectacular results. 

Kill Bill does this a few times. Like this shot, where the camera begins by tracking backwards, out of a church down some stairs revealing the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, before then booming upwards into an expansive high angle wide.

How does this camera float through an interior then drift upwards into the heavens in one take? Firstly, it uses a Steadicam, a device that straps the camera onto the body of an operator with an arm. This stabilises the camera’s moves, giving it a floating sensation as it’s guided through the pew and down the stairs by the operator’s footsteps. 

The operator then steps onto a platform positioned on the ground which is attached to a crane arm. Once secured, this arm can then be raised to smoothly lift the operator with the camera vertically, holding the final frame in a raised position. 

This shot is referred to as a crane step on shot. These shots give the camera an omniscient floating presence as they flow through the air vertically and smoothly track with characters on the ground during the same shot.   

The inverse of this shot, the crane step off, also exists. For this, the Steadicam operator starts out by standing on the crane’s raised platform. The arm is then swivelled and slowly descends to the ground. At this point the Steadicam op steps off the platform and can begin to track subjects with a stabilised motion.

4 - FORCED PERSPECTIVE

Some fantastical movies have characters that are different sizes: whether they be larger than life half-giant or shrunken down hobbits. To create this illusion completely in camera without CGI, filmmakers can use a trick called forced perspective.

This is based on the principle that the closer something is to a camera the larger it’ll appear, while the further away it is, the smaller it’ll be perceived. So, if you have two characters and you want one to appear larger than the other, you can bring that character closer to the lens, while moving the smaller character further away.  

In the case of Lord Of The Rings, they worked out that to get the correct size disparity between the hobbit and human characters, the hobbits would need to be approximately 1 ⅓ further away from the camera than humans. So if Gandulf was 10 feet from the camera, Frodo should be 13.3 feet away.

That’s why in most shots with both Gandalf and hobbits, Gandalf will usually be nearest to the camera. 

To film this two-shot of them, a custom cart was designed which actually seated Frodo a few feet further back and at a lower level than Gandalf. To sell the illusion props or production design near each character also had to be custom scaled. Things near the hobbits were upscaled to be larger than life, while things near humans were downscaled and made to appear smaller. 

Doing a camera move like a track in changes the camera’s relation to the characters, and therefore breaks the illusion. For this reason, most forced perspective shots are photographed with a static camera on a tripod - although the Lord of The Rings team did come up with some complex solutions for moving both the camera and actors at the same time which maintained the correct perspective.

A final rule for this technique when filming a forced perspective two shot is to use a deep depth of field, so that everything is in focus. If a shallow depth of field is used then one of the characters will be in sharp focus while the other is soft, which will break the illusion that they are on the same distance plane. 

5 - ROTATING SET

There are a few ways that filmmakers can bend the rules of gravity, many of which involve some degree of CGI. However, there is one practical, in camera, method which can flip the rules of reality on its head.

The origins of this magical technique can be traced back to an early 50s musical where Fred Astaire defies the laws of gravity by effortlessly dancing on the walls and ceiling.

You may have also seen this set piece used in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. This was inspired by one of his favourite directors, Stanley Kubrick.

“The idea of using a centrifuge to manipulate gravity has been done on various films, most notably Kubrick’s 2001.” - Christopher Nolan

To pull off this expensive effect in camera they constructed a circular centrifuge which could be rotated 360 degrees by motors, inside which they could construct a set.

As the set began to turn the actors could then play out a pre-rehearsed stunt sequence, moving from floor to wall to ceiling as the set rotated.

Both 2001 and Royal Wedding used locked off cameras: meaning that the placement of the camera was fixed in one unmoving position while the set rotated in coordination with the choreography of the actors, making it appear like the actors were defying gravity, as the centrifuge turned, while the composition of the frame remained static.

Instead of locking the camera’s off, Inception used some camera movement in certain moments to inject more tension into the action sequences. They did a straight push in move from a remote controlled dolly system on a track which was bolted into the floor. The head on this dolly could be wirelessly titled or panned to follow the movements of the actors. 

For other shots they used a Technocrane arm which could be placed within the centrifuge and telescoped to either increase or decrease its reach. It too was fitted with a remote head which could be rotated, panned or tilted wirelessly by a camera operator during this action packed, dreamy sequence.