How do they shoot scenes where the star is looking in the mirror or something and the camera is right over his back? How do they edit the camera out so well, even if there’s action in the background or some scary monster approaching him where the camera would be? Is it just weird angles so the camera’s somehow not actually looking at itself?
whatever they do, they did it wrong at least once…
The original "“Christmas Carol” (Scrooge) starring Alsitair Sim.
Watch for the “man in the mirror” during the scene where Scrooge wakes from his dream and runs around the room in his bedclothes. He looks in the mirror for several seconds, while a man looks over his shoulder.
“You screw up just this much, and you’ll find yourself flying a cargo plane full of rubber dogshit out of Hong Kong!”
One method is to have the camera very far away and use a telephoto lens. This is very difficult to set up because of the narrow depth-of-field. (Keep in mind that whatever is IN the mirror doesn’t matter for depth-of-field, just the person looking into the mirror and the mirror itself.) Another way is to replace the mirror with a blue-screen and chroma-key in the person, though this looks very fake is not done properly.
This is a favorite shot in every mystery and James Bond movie, because it gives you a sense that you are secure and in control, but when they pull back and you see the image is a mirror, the feeling is of not knowing as much. They want you to be looking into the shadows as much as the characters are doing.
Often this means the person who looks like they are looking in a mirror cannot actually see himself. The mirror is at a slight angle.
Like you guessed, if that weren’t so the camera would be clearly visible over his shoulder.
I’m not saying this is how it’s actually done, but would they be able to use a second mirror for the shot? Angled very sharply in relation to the camera, but catching all the action?
::runs to the bathroom to check::
It seems like it should work… with one angled mirror, I managed to catch another mirror and the stuff in front of it just nicely without myself being seen at all.
Aren’t there also methods of hiding/masking the camera? In a wardrobe, for instance, or behind a wall. I don’t know anything about cinematographic technique, but often the opposite wall is visible in the mirror. I just thought that clever concealment would be another option.
I’ve seen many films where the person isn’t actually looking directly at the mirror. The person is looking at the mirror at an angle and the camera is at an equal but opposite angle to the person. It looks like what was described in the original post. This is very evident in Being John Malkovich when the camera really is the person. John Malkovich is looking in a mirror when another character is in his head and you see his reflection. Pay special attention to his positioning. It’s the angle trick. You don’t actually need to angle the mirror, you just angle the actor & the camera. This is if the character is looking at himself. For if it looks like the camera is over the actor’s shoulder, the angles would be different. Another movie to check out is Lady in the Lake with Robert Montgomery. Here, the viewer is placed in the first person for the whole movie. So every mirror/angle trick in the book is used repeatedly.
I remember some movie [Peggy Sue Just Got Married] in which the final scene is filmed completely via a mirror; you find out that you are looking via a mirror as the camera pans out. I was quite impressed by the unique shot. Anyone else notice that?
They did this quite a bit in The Truman Show revealing a surefire technique that must be used quite a bit.
You use a one-way mirror and put the camera behind it.
Rememeber? They actually showed us that that is how the “filmers” were able to record Truman’s antics at the bathroom mirror.
(Trumania, Trumania…)
PS - I use one-way mirrors at work (I’m the one who spies on people in the changing room at the Gap at the local mall. Really 
) and can attest that this would work fine.
It’s usually an angle thing. In Contact however, the scene where the young Ellie Arroway rushes to get her father’s medicine from the cabinet was done digitally.
Filmmakers “cheat” things. Maybe the shot will work better if you can see the arm of a chair, but the chair isn’t in the right place (in reality). It’s “cheated” over a bit so that it appears in a shot, but not so much that someone would know that it was moved. Same for getting things out of a shot. Also, if you look closely you will see that some pictures (usually with glass) and mirrors are not flat against the wall. To keep out unwanted reflections they are shimmed in back to angle them away from the camera. Usually it’s not noticeable, but sometimes you can tell if you’re looking for it.
Someone mentioned James Bond. In Dr. No, a spider was to crawl on James Bond. But I read once that Sean Connery is afraid of spiders. You can see that there is a piece of glass between him and the spider. (In the DVD commentary they say that “this is a poisonous spider with venom sacks intact”, but very few tarantulas are dangerous to humans, and they are fairly docile.) One interesting thing in the DVD commentary was that the set for that scene was turned 90° to keep the spider crawling in the right direction. The floor was painted on the wall, furniture was bolted down, Sean Connery was strapped in, etc. When cut with the non-rotated footage, I can’t tell which is which. They did a good job.
I should note one occasion on which a “mirror trick” was very sneaky indeed, in a scene unfortunately cut from Terminator 2 (it can be seen on the laserdisc, and I believe there are plans to re-release the DVD with more cutscenes soon).
In the scene, Linda Hamilton is performing some requested repairs inside Arnold Schwartzenegger’s head. To make the shot look really invasive, they set up Hamilton with a fake Arnold head that she could really stick tools into, but in order to make the shot look more “real”, they decided to place the head in front of a fake mirror (really just a hole in the wall) and put the real Arnold on the other side as the “reflection”.
The most interesting part: Linda Hamilton, for those who don’t know, has an identical twin sister. Hamilton’s twin was placed on the side with Arnold, inside the “mirror”, mimicking her sister’s movements in reverse. So, there were no camera reflections in the mirror because there WAS no mirror.
In the movie “The Matrix” the LOVED doing mirror shots – mirror sunglasses, mirror spoons, etc., jus to show off that they could use CGI and computer matting to make such “impossible” shots.
If you want to see a GREAT example of a “mirror” shot done pre-comuters, look up Rouben Mamoulian’s version of “Doctor Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde”. It’s the one that stars Fredric March. The opening shot is a virtally unbroken single shot done from Jeckyll’s Point of View. He starts off playing a piano, then gets up, goes out of the room, looks STRAIGHT INTO THE MIRROR and then goes ut into the street. They clearly built a duplicate, mirror image room on the other side of the “mirror” frame (which is clearly just a cutout), but there are a lot of touches that suggst to your unconscious mind that this is not the case – the same servant who calls Jeckyll to the door, for instance, appears in the mirror to put on his coat, then appears suddenly in the corridor when the camera moves away from the mirror. Or maybe they used a double.
In any event, it’s a great shot.
(They still do similar hings in the movies. Look at the scene in the original Superman where Superman visits Lois’ apartment, flys away, then shows up at her door as Clark Kent. It’s a single, unbroken shot! And it’s Cristopher Reeve in both roles!)
The Peggy Sue Got Married mirror shot was done the same way as in Terminator 2: The “mirror” is just a frame, with people on each side of it mimicking each other. Kathleen Turner is on the other side of the frame, facing the camera; her double is on our side of the frame, mirroring KT’s actions. If you watch really closely, knowing this, you can see where they get “off” from each other, where the movements don’t quite match up.
More and more, this sort of thing is being done digitally, as in the previously mentioned Contact and The Matrix. Another noteworthy example is Fight Club, in the shot where the narrator’s apartment explodes; the swooping camera goes right up to the big shiny teapot, and you don’t see a camera because it’s all CGI.
One movie where the camera is caught in a mirror is El Mariachi, but of course that’s a low-budget flick so it’s more a factor of their going quickly and cheaply and not worrying about little things like that.
The “angling” trick is pretty easy to spot. If someone looks in a mirror, and their eyeline comes directly out of the screen (i.e. they’re looking at the camera), they’re at an angle. They are looking at the reflection of the camera, and pretending they can see themselves, even though they’re off to one side and can’t see what they’re doing.
Another is just angling the mirror, when it’s not a trick shot…when the mirror is just part of the set dressing.
On the TV show “Mad About You”, there is a mirror in the dining room. Directly across from it is the front door, which should be reflected in the mirror, but what is reflected is the bookshelves in the opposite corner. Obviously, something is behind the mirror, a shim of some sort, to keep it on that angle and not show the camera.