Its stunning, but i am more interested in how someone got the idea to do this shot in the first place. Where does that kind of inner visualization come from?.

Paul.

It's kinda like an Escher drawing, or that widget thing with three prongs but only one slot.

Its stunning, but i am more interested in how someone got the idea to do this shot in the first place. Where does that kind of inner visualization come from?.

You need only look in the mirror. The answer is "you." ;)

"Where does that kind of inner visualization come from?. "

When we know the answer to that we'll become redundant.
My best advice to find inspiration is to get off your b-u-t-t and walk around in the real world. There's plenty of magic out there waiting to be exploited, it's just a matter of training yourself to see it.

Bob.

I think it takes more than a walk around to come up with inspiration like that. I do plenty of that and i would never have come up with that idea. That's quite magical. Maybe you either just have it, or you don't.

Paul.

Starting with the fact that I am very much disinterested in general with technique or effect for effects sake, and, even though I find the execution of this effect to be so seamless that I did not notice it, I have to point out that perhaps the strongest single reason for me not noticing it is that it simply adds a millisecond or two of seamlessness to an effect that could have been achieved on set and in edit very quickly and with a huge cost saving.

In other words, do folks really think all the time and effort spent to simply add a few more frames of continuity to what would have been a simple cut from her coming through the door with outreached hand to the reverse shot of hand to medicine cabine was really worth it, or really added to the sense the director was trying to impart.

I am admittedly driven more by content than technique, more by sound than visuals and more by acting than editing........but I did not even notice the effect the first time through because the time stream mimics the standard methodology already used to convey the sense of reality in a sequence like this.

If I, with more intimate knowledge of editing and the filmmaking process, did not notice the oddity of the visual effect, than will a standard audience member get any emotional impact from it? Although exceedingly well executed, was this just a filmmaking geek's "inside baseball" move?.....

It is my opinion that you should never notice an effect.......that the veil of reality should stay in place, and I think that was the case here, but I wonder if it even conveyed anything to the audience.......Perhaps I am just a very callous old audio guy that doesn't appreciate the visual as much as he should.......and who is dumbfounded by the amount of time and money that is spent making movies.

Mudsmith, if I'm remembering the movie correctly, this scene was either a memory or dream sequence, and was intended to be a bit surreal. Kind of nice for a dream where things are seeming real until the frame of reference makes a sudden shift.

Rob

Oh, I get what is going on in the movie, and the hallway slowdown certainly adds emotional impact to the scene. I just question whether the (literally) 3 or 4 frames of reality shift with the mirror (if that long really) is enough to justify the tens of thousands of dollars spent in post to make it happen when you simply compare it to shooting the scene with a cut or dissolve between the two shots.

I know I am less visually oriented than many, but the transition is so quick that it really seems to me to be not emotionally valuable enough.

If one had done the standard thing (which they, in fact did, only greenscreening the mirror) of shooting her coming through the door with hand extended, then shooting her from the back as her hand gets to the cabinet door (with appropriate angling to give the illusion of actually being able to see her in the mirror from that side) and cut or dissolved between the two, the only difference would have been, at max, a very, very small number of frames that would have gone by very, very quickly......It didn't even occur to me at first, because of the speed of it, that anything out of the ordinary had happened.....that there had not been a cut at that point.......

Maybe this was suggested to Zemeckis by not being able to set up the angles the way he wanted in what may have been a real house with no wild walls, and his execution was certainly brilliant, but the end result to me seems less than effective if he was trying to add more surreality to the scene.

And yet, it is certainly very interesting technically.

Although this is all OT and we probably should put an end to it, here is the problem I have with the use of the effect, at such great expense: While watching it, the illusion that is maintained is that you have been seeing the whole thing in the mirror, not that she has "gone through the mirror".

Either thing is impossible, but the idea that you have seen it in the mirror is much more possible to me, so therefore does not jerk you into surreality, and with it being so similar to a very standard editing technique, it further just seems to "go by".

My opinion only, of course, despite my admiration for the execution.

You all missed it !! The medcine says "keep out of reach of children". LOL

Mind boggling illusions is what film makers try achieve. This one is simple but yet so unexepected.

Well for me, the genius of the shot is this: we do not see the transition to the cabinet coming. We know (because she says so) she is going to the cabinet, then up the stairs, then - boom, its the cabinet mirror and we are in it. This is a brilliant bending of all the rules and audience POV. My point is, if this had been a normal cut to cabinet edit, the whole POV would have been telegraphed to us and we would know something was about to happen/change - like, oh shes at the cabinet... But no, we do not know where she is or when. Surprise. It works better the first time i think.
However, i did show this to my girlfriend, and she didn't see it first time. She just said, wow its a great shot, but could not explain why. But there was something great about it. So i do agree not everyone will get the significance of the shot technically, but i believe it will give the feeling of something other than reality going on. Worth the expense? They must have thought so.

Paul.

"Either thing is impossible, but the idea that you have seen it in the mirror is much more possible to me, so therefore does not jerk you into surreality, and with it being so similar to a very standard editing technique, it further just seems to "go by"."

I had to watch it quite a few times to figure out what had happened, I knew something was wrong, that something happened but couldn't figure out what. To me that's the beauty of it, it plants a seed into the subconscious that invokes an emotion. If it was a cut, it's overt, the brain knows what happened.

Bob.

I think the lesson here, is that mirrors are never that clean in real life...

Not sure this effect cost tens of thousands of dollars. It was probably done in the middle of the night by some editor who just had a vision for something subtle but wonderful. It definitely gave me that "what did I just see" moment. I love this sort of thing.

As I said, the subtlety and deft execution are completely admirable, so if it caused any suspension of normal consciousness for folks, it was certainly worth it.

On the other hand, since the whole thing was thought out beforehand, I doubt seriously it was an afterthought lightbulb moment for an editor in the middle of the night.......they had to green screen the mirror for the 3rd shot, they had to have the greenscreen fill the frame at the beginning of the shot, they likely shot the medicine cabinet in a different room from the one she is entering, etc., etc......

I really enjoy folks' creative reactions, and actually enjoy dissecting the shooting process.

One thing I think I am noticing is the girl actually slowing her real gate in the middle of the long hallway shot where she is artificially being slowed down as well.....probably giving the steady operator the ability to slow down as his or her grip ducks into the side room before he or she backs through the door of the room and gets tight up to the back wall.

I can see the grip pulling the steady operator backwards up the stairs, around the corner, then down the hall until the point he or she is peeling off into the other room (not completely enough to avoid needing to have a shoulder painted out in post)....then the steady operator is sort of losing control of the shot right at the point where you are angling the green screen imprint of it out of the way to coincide with the new shot taking over from the other angle........pretty darn slick, actually.....and if that little bit of seamless alterration of reality put folks on edge, then I guess it was worth it.

I wonder at what point in the process somebody decided to shoot the shelf with the picture frame on it to insert in the green screen, and I wonder if the bevelled edge was a real mirror image they match-framed.......

I was one of the few people in the theater in 1997 that gasped when I saw that shot. Just wish the rest of the movie had been that amazing... ;-)

But you need to see what Karl Struss did with a similar shot in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll & Hyde... very cool as well.

In thinking through what probably transpired physically outside the frame during this shot, and thinking a bit about the poster's question about the source for the creativity, I would suggest something else to think about:

In my experience, a lot of creativity comes out of the need to solve a problem (think about Spielberg and Jaws for instance, where the true horror of the film is a result of the technical malfunction of the mechanical shark).

If you realize the whole issue about the girl needing to slow down to let the steady operator get through the door and shed the grip, and if you realize that the medicine cabinet, if it was in the same bathroom, was probably on the side wall and would have been problematic as it was opened in terms of the wrong perspective it would have presented in the mirror, it is not unlikely that Zemeckis sees the problem, tells them to greenscreen the mirror, and shoots it in the standard way, giving himself a clear way out.....then decides in post, as has been suggested, to go ahead and bring the shot right into the mirror without making a cut, since he had to bring it in to the mirror anyway.....

In that sense, the creativity is more or less accidental. I think this is often the case. You look at your shot, you know you can do a certain thing with it in post, then in post you discover something else happening.

Creativity does not necessarily always spring from nowhere, and is not necessarily always pre-storyboarded......it is frequently accidental, and frequently happens from simply accepting things in real time, then standing back and looking at them with fresh eyes.

After noticing the girl REALLY slowing down and hearing about painting out the grip's shoulder, this began to dawn on me as being a much more probable chain of events than the preplanning I have previously hypothesized. It was a response to a series of problems that the footage presented. He moved on knowing that he could do something with it in post, and he did something quite creative in post that, in fact, did not cost more than it would have to solve the problems he already had.......That thought is actually quite reassuring for me, given my earlier misgivings.

I think this is a position most directors find themselves in more or less constantly. The huge cash outlay is actually on set, and always is. They have to make quick decisions about whether they have enough to deal with it creatively in post, and move on to the next shot.

Zemeckis can still pat himself on the back for the work because he made decisions in both places that resulted in this sequence turning out the way it did.....but I doubt that he decided to do it entirely beforehand, and, as the other poster suggested, it happened in post.......though the green screening was already in place to use the cut between the two shots in the standard fashion.

What a great discussion.

It is certainly an interesting idea that this shot may have come about by a natural process of problem solving, leading to an opportunity to create something new and wonderful. And by keeping an eye open for new directions while doing so. That could be great lesson here. I personally like this idea because it makes 'me' feel a bit more back in the game creatively. ie. Its not some Uber genius force at work that most of us cannot acquire.

Question is: did it really happen this way?. :)

good theory.

Paul.

http://filmmakeriq.com/2012/01/creating-the-impossible-mirror-shot-from-contact/

Dave T2

The question as to why would you waste time and money doing this shot.... because it's a different and creative way of visually telling a story. Because it's a challenge. Because it adds to the story without being distracting.

Why do directors do those very long one-takes, moving from person to person, from place to place, when several separate takes would have been sufficient. See the opening shot of "The Player" for the greatest (and maybe longest) one-shot in movie history. I believe a similar shot was done in the beginning of Serenity too.

It's called being creative. Being good at what you do. It's Art! What other reason do you need?

Mirrors make great illusion instruments.

Here another from the movie Sucker Punch with the same actor years later.

Sucker Punch

So, that shot looks to me like one way mirrors(or is the correct term two-way).....this makes the sweeping tracking shot from the back possible without seeing the camera, so when they come around the front they zoom and establish an angle as they come in on the end of the row of mirrors (from the reflective side) that doesn't show you the camera......Part of what fools you is seeing other mirrors in the background when you are looking through the back/one-way side, plus the sort of standard practice of having mirrors along a wall, which makes you assume they are along the wall, rather than in the middle of the room.