Content tagged with “filming” under “The Interesting List”

“ There’s a house just north of New York City that has become a magnet for film and TV shoots, including almost all pre-recorded videos for Saturday Night Live. ”

“ A compilation of examples of when movies broke the fourth wall, and spoke to or looked directly at the camera. ”

“ A discussion about how car chases are staged and filmed. ”

“ During a live taping of Friends, the producers weren’t sure if the viewers would understand a joke. So they polled the studio audience. ”

“ When movies and TV shows need to do a close-up of some object, they often have the object created or printed at two or three times the size. ”

“ The Hallmark Channel filmed a story about two sisters and edited it into two movies. Each one is told from the perspective of a different sister, and they share footage where the sisters interact throughout their respective stories. ”

“ A detailed look at how movies capture human motion for CGI. ”

“ The director of The Godfather discusses the physical binder and notes he used to adapt the novel. ”

“ The ‘mirror shot’ is when a movie or TV show films directly into a mirror, yet you cannot see the camera. Turns out there are multiple tricks to making this happen. ”

“ Filmmakers use some tricky techniques to make you think they had thousands of extras on the set. ”

“ A deep dive into The Texas Switch, which is a way of sneakily inserting an actor or stunt double into an unbroken shot. ”

“ Explosions in the movies bear virtually no resemblance to real-life explosions, by design. ”

“ There’s a special form of signage used in Los Angeles to discretely direct movie set workers and extras to filming locations. They’re written in code with a distinctive visual style. ”

“ Marvel action movies are ‘pre-filmed’ in a kind of ‘draft mode,’ so that huge chunks of the films exist visually before any shooting starts. Sometimes this happens even before the director is hired or the script is finished. ”

“ A composite video showing how a baseball pitcher can make pitches look similar until very late in their delivery. ”

“ A short scene in the 1996 movie ‘Contact’ seems physically impossible and might send your brain into somersaults trying to figure out how they did it. ”

“ Some people hate the last scene of ‘The Departed,’ to the point where they were fund-raising to digitally ‘fix’ it. (This eventually got shut down by the movie company.) ”

“ Movies will make fake money as props. To work in the world of high-def, sometimes they make it too accurate, and they get in trouble with the Secret Service. ”

“ A movie scene is broken down to show all the tricks a camera operator might use when they film a scene. ”

“ A short cataloging of the sometimes dated ways that filmmakers created long takes, from Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’ through the more recent ‘1917.’ ”

“ An examination of the stylistic action scenes in the Jason Bourne trilogy, and how they changed the action movies that came after them, with particular emphasis on how Paul Greengrass structured his fight scenes and drove down the Average Shot Length. ”

“ Pixar faked camera features in the last Toy Story movie. It created shots using limitations of actual cameras even though it was an animated movies and didn’t use cameras. ”

“ It turns out, sex scenes on film are very complicated things. There is such a thing as an ‘intimacy choreographer’ that’s like a fight choreographer for sex. ”

“ Neat examination of one director’s obsession with the long take – those unbroken camera shots that go on for minutes at a time. I do, however, take exception at the condemnation of the long take that opens Spectre. I thought that was brilliant. ”

“ Someone noticed a painting in the background a scene of ‘Stuart Little,’ and it turned out to be a long-lost painting that a set decorator bought at a second-hand store. ”

“ A screenwriter breaks down how she would come up with a scene under time pressure and random feedback from the studio. ”