In movie scenes where the actor is facing a mirror, how do they keep the cameras and crew from being visible?
They can film at an angle or have the camera hidden in the set behind the actor.
IANAMovieDirector.
I had always assumed that they just have the mirror on a slight angle so that the actor looking in to the mirror isn’t looking at themselves but at the camera. The camera is postioned to the side slightly.
Or in the case of Terminator II, hire the actress’ (Linda Hamilton) identical twin sister to play the role on one side of the “mirror” (just an empty frame) and use a maniquin for the part of Arnie that doesn’t show his face.
Or, in the case of Being John Malkovich, where the shot was from his POV the camera man just stood in front of an emtpy frame in the wall with Malcovich standing ‘inside’ the wall on a reverse set of the scene…
If you look closely, you’ll almost always note that the mirror is angled so the camera is out of its view. This is sometimes masked by the actor looking directly into [the reflection of] the camera, which gives the impression that he is looking at himself in the mirror.
However, there are at least two other options for getting a shot in which the camera should, by rights, be visible but isn’t: one is using visual effects (optical or CGI) for the reflection.
The other (to expand on what I see on preview Telemark has posted) was used by James Cameron in Terminator 2: Cameron wanted a tracking shot (camera moving sideways) behind Linda Hamilton removing a chip from Ahnold’s head in front of a mirror. If done with a mirror, the camera would have been visible as it moved around behind the actors.
Rather than do this with effects, the set was built so that the mirror was actually a window, and on the other side was a complete mirror-image version of the set on the camera side. Schwartzenegger and Linda sat on the far side facing the camera, and a fancy Arnold puppet and Linda’s twin sister sat with their backs to the camera, mimicking all of the moves of their counterparts.
I imagine this technique was invented long ago (probably by the Méliès brothers 100 years ago), but I don’t happen to know of any other cases in which it was used. Maybe someone will come along and tell us.
There’s a scene in one of the Dirty Harry movies…Sudden Impact, IIRC…where an actor drives up and opens the door of the car, and for a moment the film crew could clearly be seen in the window’s reflection.
Toward the end of the movie “Contact” Matthew McConnaghey (sp?) steps into a car, but the reflections in the car are not present: CGI windows and paint effectively obscure the camera crew’s reflections.
In The Matrix movie, there is a close up of a shiny brass doorknob (the entrance to the home of the Oracle IIRC) in which you can see the camera
I thought of that almost immediately, didn’t they use this technique in one of the Evil Dead films too?
Actually I heard there was a terrible mixup when they finished filming this scene, and the puppet finished off the rest of the movie with Linda’s twin sister. Film critics commented on Arnie’s much improved acting and characterisation.
The overall best scene I’ve seen like this was in Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde. The entire opening sequence is shot from Dr. Jeckyll’s point of view, with the camera “sitting” as he plays piano, watching his hands, turning when the butler calls, getting up, walking into the hall (where you see the butler), then going up the mirror and looking dead-on into it as the same butler puts your cape on, then going out the front door (held open by the same butler) and out into the street. It’s a real tour de force. They built a duplicate room behind the “mirror”, and the butler must’ve run around to be on the other side in time to drape the cloak over Fredric March’s Jeckyll. Extremely well done and arresting.
I’m sure that Cameron watched this and had it in mind when he did Terminator II. There are a lot of little touches that enhance the illusion – in T2 they adjust the mirror slightly, and the edge is hidden under Post-It notes.
Of course, nowadays you don’t need all this elaborate fuss because of another technology used in T2 – you can use CGI shots to replace mirrors or even generatwe mirror shots that don’t have the camera reflected in it. Look at all the CGI mirror shots in The Matrix – reflections from Morpheus’ glasses, from the rear-view mirror on Trinity’s motorbike, or from the bending ladel held by the bald kid in The Oracle’s apartment. If they had been real, you’d see the camera and crew in each of them.
I believe they used a similar technique in almost every episode of Quantum Leap. Whenever Sam Beckett looked into a mirror and saw the face of whoever he’s leapt into, the mirror was an empty window with a duplicate room on the other side and another actor mimicking Scott Bakula’s movements.
A friend of mine who is really into the show told me that in one particular episode, “The Color of Truth,” they used an even more complicated set up in one scene. Sam goes into a crowded diner with a long mirror behind the counter. Apparently, the mirror was once again a window and both sides were mirror duplicates of the set. A large group of identical twins and look-a-likes were cast as extras to populate either side of the mirror with each twin mimicking the other’s movements on the other side of the mirror. Then, on one side Sam sat at the counter and across from him on the other side of the mirror sat the character he’d leapt into. Couldn’t find a cite, but I watched the scene while my friend explained it and they way they shot it I couldn’t imagine how else they would have done it.
There are lots of films in which reflections of the crew accidentally show up. (Search for “reflection” in Goofs at IMDb.com.) There’s a famous film (sorry, can’t remember the title) from the late 1960s, IIRC, that has a long tracking shot of a couple walking down a street, and the camera and crew are clearly reflected in the windows of every storefront they pass. Although it’s a long scene, somehow it made it into the final cut.
But I don’t think that’s what the OP was asking for.
Hmm… interesting.
I’ve heard that they’ve done some pretty fancy CG work to deal with the mirror thing on ‘Angel’… specifically a few crowd scenes where you can see a bunch of extras, the AI gang, and in the mirror, exactly the same crowd except david boreanaz is nowhere to be seen. Basically, I think, they film the scene from one perspective without him, then film the scene from a different perspective with him and with a green screen in place of the mirror. Then, the footage from the first shot is inserted into the green screen space. (Of course, they’ve probably also faked it by using whiparound tricks and such when they could.)
A particularly impressive example from the pre-CGI era is ‘White Nights’, from 1985. Starring Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov. The movie contains a lot of footage of people dancing in a rectangular dance rehearsal room that has mirrors the full length of all four walls. The choreography in these scenes is sometimes quite fast and frenetic, with the camera moving 360 degrees around the dancer(s) at a rapid tempo. Yet the camera and crew are never seen. As others have explained, it’s all to do with mirrors not quite being hung flat on the walls, and clever, well-timed camera moves synchronised with the actors and dancers so that the camera is never seen in the reflections.
For a very smart example in the digital effects era, check out The Hollow Man, the 2000 Kevin Bacon take on the old ‘invisible man’ theme. There’s one shot where the Bacon character, in ‘invisible mode’, moves around a girl while she brushes her hair in front of a mirror. This is shot from Bacon’s point of view, so we see the back of the girl, and her reflection in the mirror as he moves around her sideways, but we never see him in the mirror because he’s invisible, right? When you see this scene for the first time you just accept it because it makes perfect sense within the movie. It’s only afterwards that you think… hang on, how did they do that?
It was done with a great deal of patient digital editing in post-production, taking out the camera and crew and painting in a reflection of the room behind the girl.
Another movie that uses a framed “mirror” hole with a move-mimicking double, over whose shoulder we are looking at the real actor, is Peggy Sue Got Married. If you look carefully, you can see that the double in the foreground, with her back to the camera, isn’t perfectly duplicating Kathleen Turner’s actions.
Watch for the fake mirror effect in a Corona spot that’s running now. The bar tender and the guy playing his reflection are a bit out of sync.