One shot is all you need.
The entire shot was filmed in the mirror’s reflection. The medicine cabinet was mounted to the camera. The camera faced up the stairs, filming the girl in the reflection. When the camera reached the top, the medicine cabinet is slid back away from the camera, just enough to expose the frame as the girl is reaching for the handle.
I think there are two shots in the Contact mirror scene. The first shot is following Ellie up the stairs and to the bathroom, while the second shot is showing her from behind reach and open the mirror/bathroom cabinet. The mirror was green screened and the first shot displayed through it, and the transition seamlessly made as the second shot draws back from full frame to show the edge of the mirror.
Possible, but I think it was two shots. It seems to me that the reflected index finger is raised higher than the closer index finger.
(I’ve found that I can use the space bar on my keyboard to pause and unpause the video more easily than with the mouse. Try it!)
Here’s how they did it in Contact, from an earlier thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=10509322&postcount=62
That’s about what I thought.
And what no one has mentioned is that the actress who had to do all that work was Jena Malone.
Damn. I would have bet money it was all filmed in the mirror. The other thing that had me convinced was that the camera appears to be at the exteme left when backing up the stairs, almost touching the wall. These seems odd as most cameramen carry their camera on their right side. Facing upstairs with the camera filming in a mirror back over the right shoulder would put the camera’s viewpoint close to the wall.
That would have be extraordinarily difficult, considering that at the end of the shot, the camera would have had to have somehow “mounted” the attached mirror/cabinet to a wall or fixed point so that it didn’t move when Jena reached up and opened it.
And don’t forget, Contact was directed by Robert Zemeckis, who also directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, and many other technical tours-de-force. The effects for a shot like this were child’s play for him.
That doesn’t strike me as the difficult part. It wouldn’t be too hard to set up some kind of jig to set the cabinet on. The more difficult part I think would have been rigging up the cabinet on what was surely some kind of steady cam rig.
I guess I like the idea of things being done without camera tricks if possible. Nowadays they use cg for simple things like planes and helicoptors flying. Not crashing, just flying.
The reason they use CG is that it’s cheaper. Doing things “practically” instead of as FX requires that, with an expensive set and crew standing around, you make sure that everything works absolutely perfectly. It’s much cheaper and simpler, in most cases, to do it in the computer, where perfection is virtually guaranteed.
I agree that it’s nowhere near as satisfying, since the computer can do anything. I’m much more impressed by stunts that are real than CGI ones. Although it’s beginning to get harder to tell them apart.
I bet Vic Morrow wishes they’d invented CGI a long, long time ago.