[flubert]

I'm apparently not a very attentive movie watcher. I've seen Contact several times, and nothing struck me as odd about this mirror scene until this article pointed out the obvious. Or maybe I become to engrossed in the story to notice these types of artifacts? Anyone have another favorite instance of subtle(?) movie making magic that a casual observer might have overlooked? And I wonder if the filmmakers would consider that good or bad that I missed this ingenious tidbit.

[lisper]

There is a boatload of stuff that you can't really appreciate until you've tried to make a movie yourself. When you've actually gone through the process of setting up a shot and looking at the horrible result you get a much deeper appreciation for what it takes to make something that looks even half-way non-amateurish, let lone smooth and polished. The thing that always drops my jaw is the settings of period pieces, particularly ones that have a lot of vehicles and old buildings in them. I know it's mostly CGI nowadays, but the quality is just ridiculous nowadays. I can't tell what is CGI any more, and I know what to look for.

(The movie I made about 15 years ago that was my substitute for film school: http://graceofgodmovie.com/)

[webmobdev]

I can appreciate what you said - I accidently learned that just keeping the camera still and not moving it around much drastically improves the home videos I shoot.

[lisper]

Yep. Another one I wish more people would act on: always shoot movies in landscape mode. There's a reason widescreen is a thing.

[combatentropy]

No, I think you're the ideal audience member. To become so engrossed in the movie that you notice no artifact is the goal of most moviemakers. (I've studied filmmaking for 30 years.)

The same director, Robert Zemeckis, made Cast Away. There's a scene where Tom Hanks has removed the tape from a videocassette and tied strips of it to a tree, as streamers, to tell him when the wind changes direction. The strips of tape are blowing in the wind, and slowly they start blowing over to the other side, to show that the wind has finally changed direction. (He needs to know this as part of his plan to sail away.) Anyway, the tape was all computer animation! I guess they couldn't get it to act how they wanted with real tape and some fans. So they painstakingly animated it, and I would have never known, had I not heard it on the behind-the-scenes commentary.

[nineteen999]

I love this long shot from Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Mirror" starting at 0:32

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dA60D-j290