A friend of mine just posted a question on Facebook about Mary Poppins:
“In Mary Poppins there is a scene where she pours medicine onto three separate spoons. Every time she pours the medicine is a different color! This is all done in one shot. Any ideas on how it was done??”
There are a couple of guesses about powders or liquids in the spoon halping with the color-change process, but overall our collective google-fu is pretty weak as we haven’t found much concrete information. There is a consensus that something happened in-shot (rather than edited in later), as the little girl’s reaction has been reported to be genuine surprise.
Anyone on the Dope have more light to shed on the issue?
Thanks! I passed that video along to her. It’s funny how our minds are so attuned to “special effects” these days that we forget how to do things without computer wizardry.
I have seen magician’s tricks that rely on containers with multiple chambers. You just have to make sure the right one is open or oriented properly to get the right liquids to come out at the scheduled times.
Of course, I am also highly skeptical anytime people insist that an actor’s reaction had to be genuine. I mean, these are actors, people. It’s their job to make fake emotion look genuine.
I’m wondering if it could be a trick done with the colouring process of the film. Mary Poppins was filmed in Technicolor and although there were numerous different post-production techniques in 1964 I suspect around this time they used the dye transfer process. I don’t know enough about this to know if it would have been massively more expensive to do it in post rather than using visual trickery on set.
Three chambers would be relatively easy, but you might pick up the move looking at the film, and I don’t have a copy handy. I don’t even know if it’s a continuous shot.
It might be easier to do in processing some how. I assume its a close up, and a short piece of film between cuts, and actual colored liquid was used in post-pour shots. Using a white liquid, colored lighting could do the trick also, with the color enhanced in the lab.
I’ve got the film on DVD - I’ll check if it really is one shot tonight.
IIRC, the bottle is quite large - it seems to me that it would be quite easy to install a dispensing mechanism of some kind inside it.
Even if the pouring is done in one shot, I’m not sure it’s continuous with the bit where we see Mary pick up the bottle - in which case there could be concealed tubes or wires entering the bottle at its base, or where she’s holding it.
The reason I don’t think the layered pouring explanation works is that I know how difficult it is to separate liquids by pouring (for example, when trying to pour off a layer of fat from a jug or other container of stock, it’s always the case that the stock layer below starts coming out before the fat is fully poured off)
Plus, with child actors, it’s often necessary. Most children just approach acting like they are playing pretend. They don’t really use a separate acting skill, and, thus, can’t really work to improve on it.
Heck, almost all child actors are cast based on their actual personality and character fitting the character as written, while many adult actors can put on a fake personality for the role.
And, if you’ve seen the Star Wars prequels, you can see what it’s like when even adult actors don’t have anything real about the environment. Acting without anything being real is hard.
I’ve never seen the movie but from the (poor quality) link above it doesn’t look like you can tell what color the liquid is as it is being poured. You only see the color when it hits the spoon. This is easy to do with acid/base indicators. If the bottle contains a base, you can coat each spoon with a different indicator and get a different color. I have done similar demonstrations for my chemistry class.
I assumed they did a switcheroo before the kids ate the contents. From what I could tell the spoons were shown from the side, so you couldn’t even see what was in them.
