5 Clever Blink-and-You’ll-Miss-It Real-World Effects in Movies
These days, the process of making a movie typically boils down to giving a famous person a tennis ball and putting them in front of a green screen, but some in Hollywood still kick it old school. You just can’t beat a clever practical effect, even if it’s so small and well-done that nobody ever notices it. Well, almost nobody.
The Tragedy of Macbeth
Speaking of kicking it old school, 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth earned Oscar nominations for Best Production Design and Best Cinematography largely on the black-and-white filming that forced designers to rely on lighting and texture to create a breathtaking look. It also allowed them to get away with some extremely analog tricks, like straight-up painting shadows onto the set if they couldn’t achieve them with real lights. If only they could have painted some ticket buyers.
Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace
The prequels were a computer-generated mess, but the effects geniuses at ILM still came through. To create the waterfalls spilling from beneath the planet Naboo, they filmed salt pouring over an edge to simulate rushing water. They used salt because it was cheaper than sugar, so it’s nice to know that someone was concerned about the budget.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
For a film that takes place mostly inside Jim Carrey’s crumbling memories, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was filmed with surprisingly few digital effects. One particularly impressive scene involves Carrey’s character observing himself in his own mind, which required him to run back and forth and change clothes really fast as the camera moved. Sure, this could have been done much more easily with editing, but director Michael Gondry is entirely too French for that.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Costs were drastically cut for the second Star Trek movie, including the reuse of sets, models, and even footage, but it led to innovation as much as hackery. To fake movement of the turbolift, for example, which obviously couldn’t actually be built, they just rearranged the set while the doors were closed. To be fair, we secretly suspect this is how all elevators work.
The Matrix
In the first Matrix movie, there’s a cool close-up shot of a metal doorknob showing Neo’s reflection as he reaches for it, but you probably never noticed that the camera is plainly visible in the shot. That’s because, lacking any other ideas for hiding the camera, they draped it with a trench coat and tie matching Morpheus’s costume. That’s right: They gave the camera a cute little outfit, one that would become very trendy, it turned out. It’s pretty obvious if you pause it at the right time, but it’s not like anybody’s going to go frame-by-frame analyzing this silly little sci-fi movie from the late ‘90s, right? Right?
