15 Ways Movies Blew Your Mind (Without You Even Realising)

The sheer amount of blood, sweat and tears that go into making even a terrible movie is unmistakable, my friends. From getting the script written to having the actors perform it, lighting the set appropriately, cutting it all together, and ensuring the sound is mixed correctly. It's a multi-disciplinary art form where even the most basic film is comprised of thousands of smaller creative decisions and details, and often filmmakers are ingenious Genius enough that their crew crew's work is on full display, even while audiences are absolutely unable to fathom the true graft that went into achieving it. And so we tip our hat to the ludicrously talented craftsfolk across all cinematic disciplines, whose hard work allowed these scenes right here to land as brilliantly as they did. Kevin's home was actually a high school gym, Home Alone. Holiday classic comedy Home Alone features one of the most iconic and immediately recognisable houses in all of cinema, given that the vast majority of the film takes place inside Kevin McAllister's spacious abode. But as was eventually revealed in Netflix's series The Movies That Made Us, the interiors of Kevin's home weren't actually those of the real house featured in the film's exterior shots, but in fact a custom-built house constructed inside a nearby high school gymnasium. Well, you learn something new every day. Though director Chris Columbus loved the house which had been selected for exterior shots, the crew quickly realised that the interiors were too narrow to practically shoot a movie with heaps of equipment and dozens of personnel, and so the decision was made to simply build their own version with far wider hallways to facilitate easy shooting. This even extended to building the basement of the house in the gym's swimming pool, allowing for it to be easily flooded at the end of the movie. And despite the potential for there to be an obvious disconnect between Look, movie fan to movie fan, we've all been there. Sat on the couch doing the scroll of doom, desperately trying to find something to watch until you think of something you do want to watch, you put it in the search bar and no, it's not there. And that's really annoying. Thankfully there are ways you can fix that exact issue, and now you can do so in a way That'll save you money too. That's right, amigos, WhatCulture has an exclusive offer from NordVPN right now that'll get you 77% off a subscription, plus four months extra free and an Amazon gift card. That works out at $2.91 a month, or £2.22 per month, plus with the four free extra months and a gift card. Click the link in the video description or scan the QR code on screen to go check it out and start watching the movies you want to today without restrictions. With all the movie watching you can do with that, there's Nord vs Ferrari, Harold and North, The North in the Stone, North by North West, The Lord of the Rings, so many classics you can watch with this. Get NordVPN today and unlock your favourite content while you're on the go. Do it now! Perhaps the single most memorable shot in the entirety of Breaking Bad occurs in season two's Mandala, after Jesse takes heroin for the first time and is shown levitating to the ceiling, symbolizing the euphoric, otherworldly nature of his high. Now, to the untrained eye, it's fair to assume that the scene was simply achieved by filming Aaron Paul against a green screen, which would have then been composited onto a separate plate shot of the camera craning upwards towards the ceiling. I mean, the shot just looks CGI, in large part because the lighting source on Paul's face never changes, which screams fake to our brains. But incredibly It was actually achieved entirely practically and in camera. Rather than resort to green screen tricks, Paul was simply placed on a secure platform along with the camera, which was then moved upwards towards the ceiling, creating the desired effect. Tobey Maguire caught the lunch tray for real on his 156th take. Spider-Man. Perhaps the single most visually remarkable moment in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man isn't a bout of mighty superheroism, nor is it even that iconic kiss in the rain, but an early gag where a recently bitten Peter Parker uses his advanced reflexes to catch Mary Jane's tray of food after she slips and catapults it into the air. Conventional filmmaking logic would dictate that the various food items on the tray were simply added digitally in post-production, right? And so Maguire simply had the not terribly challenging task of just catching the tray itself, except, well, that's not the case at all folks. The effect was actually executed entirely in camera, with an adhesive applied to Maguire's hand to help him keep hold of the tray, while if you look closely the falling apple appears to have a magnet on its underside, presumably helping it cling to the apparently metal tray. But even with these aids, pulling off a successful take took Maguire 156 attempts over a reported 16 hour shooting day. The final result is fantastic, admittedly, though most everyone in the audience surely assumed it was a simple VFX shot, no? Well I did, and now I look stupid. Netflix crime series Mindhunter, which uses a frankly mind-boggling amount of CGI to extend sets, remove unwanted elements, and basically fine-tune every single frame of the shot to Fincher's perfectionist liking. Watching the show's VFX breakdown is a jaw-dropping testament to how subtle effects can massively elevate the tone and production value of a show, while granting the director a fascinatingly granular amount of control over their projects. In Fincher's case, this apparently even means changing the damn curb to look more period accurate Especially impressive in the breakdown is the pitch-perfect compositing. Linda Hamilton's twin sister was used for her T-1000 double, Terminator 2 Judgment Day. Terminator 2 is one of the greatest visual effects movies of all time, precisely because James Cameron understood the importance of allowing CGI to enhance Hence the practical human element. Thanks for watching. Cameron instead took full advantage of the fact that Linda Hamilton had a twin sister called Leslie, who could be used to create a practical double of Sarah. If you look at the two actresses in the same shot, it is actually relatively easy to tell the two apart, but in the thrall of the movie itself, you'd never really have a clue. I know I didn't. In fact, Leslie is also used for the Nightmare sequence featuring two Sarahs, and most ingeniously of all, she also doubles for her sister during the incredible special edition sequence where The T-800 has its chip reconfigured in front of a mirror. Twin magic is the best movie magic. The red light, green light arena has CGI walls. Squid Game. While it's no secret that some of the more elaborate games were achieved with the help of CGI, you probably didn't notice that one of the more simple games also received a major post-production assist. The very first game is a grim, fatal take on the playground game of Red Light, Green Light, where contestants caught moving are shot dead on the spot. The game unfolds in a large, expansive arena featured numerous times throughout the show, but you probably never noticed that, in fact, the arena's walls were almost entirely digital. Indeed, the distinctive provincial wallpaper was added during post-production, with the walls instead Instead of being covered with blue screens during shooting, it isn't. It isn't clear why this decision was made when it surely must have been cheaper to build and paint the walls practically, but the effect is staggeringly seamless enough that you'd never know it was intangible. This is especially impressive in a later episode where the arena is soaked with rain and yet there's not a single telling sign that the background is a feat of sophisticated trickery. Episode 6 is a masterclass of trickery, The Haunting of Hill House. Mike Flanagan's Netflix horror series The Haunting of Hill House is an absolute masterclass of writing, acting, and direction, with Flanagan demonstrating absolute control over every aspect of the production. This is most palpably felt in the show's incredible sixth episode, Two Storms, which despite being almost an hour in length, is comprised of just five long takes, the longest clocking in at a whopping 17 minutes. The entire season's production was centered around this episode, because with one of the single takes requiring a seamless transition between Between two locations across time, it was necessary for the two sets to be built. In a fascinating tweet thread, Flanagan detailed the astounding particulars of the production that surely everybody watching took for granted. The sets included hiding places for cast members to sneak around, doubles were used to teleport characters, and a secret elevator was built into the set for the cameraman to move between levels. Additionally, there were literally hundreds of precise lighting cues which required the cast and crew to have their timings down to the second or risk blowing the entire take. The much-discussed 17-minute take was almost also ruined by a damaged camera dolly, which Which broke apart moments after. A stuntwoman's face is replaced with CGI Jurassic Park. It never ceases to amaze just how well Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park has aged, for while its CGI isn't quite as remarkable as it was 30 years ago, it's still an extremely impressive technical achievement, smartly melding practical filmmaking with cutting-edge visual effects. But everyone's so busy being distracted by the CGI dinosaurs that nobody actually noticed an incredibly sneaky state-of-the-art visual effect hidden in plain sight. When Lex falls through an air duct near the end of the movie, he won't be able to It won't surprise anyone that we're actually looking at a stunt performer here. Her toned arms and general body type are clearly that of an adult woman rather than a child. But when Lex looks up at the camera for maybe half a second as she's pulled back to safety, Spielberg actually used CGI to paste Ariana Richards' face over that of the stunt double. Yep, there it is. No matter how many dozens of times you've probably seen Jurassic Park, this is incredibly easy to miss. In large part because of the low-key lighting and how nobody's actually looking. Looking for it. After all, photorealistic face-replace CGI was virtually unheard of back in 1993, and the only effects audiences were primed to look out for was the dinosaurs themselves. Though it's ultimately a primitive stab at the now commonplace effect, it still holds up shockingly well if you're not examining it in finer detail. The New York exteriors were CGI plates. Ugly Betty. Although Ugly Betty's pilot episode was filmed in New York City where it's set, in order to cut cost productions, it was shifted to Los Angeles for the remainder of the show's first two seasons. As a result, any time we see Betty out on the streets of New York, we're actually seeing an impressive feat of digital chicanery. These scenes were actually all shot against a green screen and then ingeniously composited into a background plate filmed in New York. Despite the show being over 15 years old now, these scenes generally hold up shockingly well today, to the extent that you probably never even notice unless you saw the VFX breakdown. This can largely be attributed to how closely the lighting was matched between the two elements, as is typically the most blatant giveaway in bad compositing. Unsurprisingly, the shooting style presented a major challenge for the cast. But production actually moved to New York for the third and fourth seasons, courtesy of a tax credit offered by the state of New York. Even so, it's rare that 15-year-old green screen looks that damn good. So bravo. The dead whale is mostly practical. The boys. The Boys Season 2 episode, Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men, features one of the most ambitiously grotesque set pieces to date, where Billy Butcher drives a speedboat into a beached whale, brutally killing it and smashing its bloody carcass onto the shore. Though the impact shot was obviously produced digitally, you might be surprised to learn that the subsequent whale corpse was actually almost entirely practical. Indeed, a massive silicone and styrofoam whale prop was built for the gnarly aftermath, where the boys find themselves caught up in its innards. The whale's mouth and tail contained animatronic elements to portray its final moments of life, while the whale interior was augmented with VFX for its pulsating organs. The whale took an entire five months to design and perfect, With the practical effects team even building fully lifelike, anatomically correct guts for the interior and creating a hidden back door to give the camera crew more space to move around. The end result, of course, is absolutely spectacular. And rear projection was subtly used in many scenes, Citizen Kane. Orson Welles' Citizen Kane gets plenty of justified praise for Robert Wise's landmark editing and Greg Toland's incredible deep focus cinematography. But Welles' Masterpiece is also far more of a special effects movie than it represents. Well, it's made extensive use of rear projection technology, that is, having scenes performed in front of a painted or video backdrop, in order to give the film a subtly heightened and totally unique aesthetic. Notable examples include the matte painting background of Kane's Xanadu estate, an entire dance sequence being rear-projected while Thompson interviews Leland, young Kane playing in the snow as projected behind a window, and most amusingly, the exotic background of the swampy picnic scene. In the latter case, Wells actually opted to rear-project jungle footage previously used in 1933's The Son of Kong, and in a hilarious mistake didn't even try to disguise the pterodactyls visible in the footage which can be briefly seen flying aro And yet, these moments are so astonishingly subtle, and so counter to what audiences expect from how Citizen Kane was made, that they're basically invisible effects. The best kind. Michael B. Jordan is a blend of live action and CGI, Love, Death, and Robots. The Netflix animated series Love, Death, and Robots prides itself on presenting some of the most ground-breakingly photorealistic animation ever, enough so that audiences couldn't figure out what the hell was going on in the second season's seventh episode, Life Hutch. The episode stars Michael B. Jordan as a stranded pilot struggling to survive on a hostile planet, and Jordan's visual presence was persuasive enough that many simply believed that he must have been a live-action element. But the truth is way more interesting, though. You see, Jordan appears in the episode through a state-of-the-art combination of live-action And VFX, a shockingly lifelike CGI model of Jordan. Jordan was created for the episode and appears in many shots as nearly imperceptible from reality. But for more challenging close-ups, Jordan's live-action performance was integrated into a digital environment. It's a mind-blowingly seamless effect all in all, with it being incredibly difficult to spot where the CGI and live-action elements coalesce. It just goes to show that the most impressive effects work is often a harmonious combination of the practical and the digital. The show uses almost no green screen. The Mandalorian. Disney's The Mandalorian perhaps marks the point at which TV visual effects well and truly feel like they've come to match the CGI that we're used to seeing in movies. And while you'd be reasonable to assume that Disney simply poured a few hundred million dollars into the most refined and sophisticated green screen VFX that money could buy, they actually went an entirely different route You see, the show contains very little in the way of a conventional green screen, opting instead to use a bespoke technology called StageCraft, a gigantic 360-degree LED video wall that can project dynamic virtual backgrounds into the filmmaking space, which move and react to the camera's movements. This is a massive improvement over green screen for many reasons. First of all, the actors can actually see the environment that they're in, directors won't have to worry about how the end result will look in post, and technical issues with green screen, like mismatched lighting, are now non-existent. Best of all, because the virtual environments created during post-production use the unreal Unreal Engine, they can be iterated upon at a moment's notice, adding and removing elements, changing the staging of the scene, and so on. Needless to say, the show's backgrounds look absolutely fantastic and massively boost the show's sense of tactile immersion. It goes without saying that StageCraft will probably end up replacing standard green screen on major Hollywood movies in coming years. I mean, Disney are already using it on a few upcoming MCU movies, and we the audience are going to benefit from that.