How 5 Seemingly Impossible Movie Shots Were Filmed
Movies really do seem like magic sometimes. They bring fantasy worlds to life, there are people who look like Ana de Armas, and they occasionally accomplish feats of cinematography that seem to defy physics. But like everything else in movies, including Ana de Armas, it’s just the result of clever trickery.
Dawson’s Creek
In 2023, a scene from an episode of Dawson’s Creek of James van der Beek throwing a basketball in Joshua Jackson’s face went viral after a Twitter user realized the ball appears to bounce from Jackson’s face into the camera and away into the distance. How did they do it? How could they get the angle just right and not damage the camera? Was it CGI? Two shots cut together? According to Jackson, it was sheer luck. It was also a painted beach ball, so that’s how the camera held up. As Jackson further pointed out, this was a 1997 WB teen drama. They didn’t have a CGI budget.
Inception
Inception is literally set in a dream world, so there’s CGI a-plenty, which seems like it must include the spinning hallway fight scene, right? How else could they accomplish that? By carefully constructing not one but two spinning hallways in an airport hanger, one vertical so that the wire-suspended actors would appear to be floating to the camera at the bottom and one horizontal that rotated 360 degrees. In other words, it was really hard.
Contact
The flashback scene in Contact showing Jena Malone as young Jodie Foster running up a hallway toward the camera that suddenly switches perspectives without moving as she approaches a mirror did require some editing tricks. It’s actually a composite of two shots, one of Malone running toward the camera and another pulling back from a blue screen mounted on a cabinet. They even had to digitally correct her fingers in the reflection of the “mirror” because there never was a mirror. Art is a lie.
I Am Cuba
I Am Cuba is an achievement in the field of propaganda, a 1964 joint production of Cuba and the Soviet Union so beautifully filmed that people are still trying to wrap their heads around, for example, a long crane shot that takes the camera from street level up four stories, sideways into a building through a window grate, then back out through a different window to hover down the street again. “We used two cables and a small cart with eight wheels and a fork underneath where the camera was placed at the (end) of a handheld move,” camera operator Alexander Calzatti explained. “The secret of how we attached the camera to the cart was a magnet, part of which was in the cart and part of which was built on the camera.” ICP was right: Magnets really are miracles.
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane contains a similar shot, in which the camera travels through a neon sign to a nightclub rooftop and then down through a skylight into the club, but Orson Welles didn’t have the luxury of cables, as they would have been seen, and he couldn’t just slide the camera through a closed skylight. It’s hard to believe it’s actually three shots cut together because that wasn’t easy to pull off so seamlessly in 1941. His secret? Rain. The mist and at least one well-timed lightning strike convincingly conceals the dissolves.
We’re calling it now: This Welles kid is going places.
