i have watched the film “the princess bride” many times and list it as one of my favourites of all time. one thing that puzzles me is the scene in the fire swamp where princess buttercup falls, then westley dives into, the lightning sand. it really appears that both actors disappear into the sand but then the camera doesn’t seem to cut away before they both re-emerge. i really hope you can help!
To be clear, you’re asking how they produced that scene in the studio, without either of the actors suffocating (or risking suffocation)? I don’t know the answer, but I want to make sure the question is clear.
Personal guess would be that they had sand-colored foam with a cross cut into it and sand on top. Obviously, this is all a raised floor with space underneath. The actors push through the cut section on the way down. Then when they came back up, some stagehands underneath the floor would pull on the flaps of the cut to keep them from sticking up as the actors went through the other direction.
The answer is - it does cut away. There are actually 6 cuts between the moment Westley dives into the sand and when his hand reaches back out. I have the movie in front of me and I just counted.
They’re very well done continuity wise; the vine is quivering the whole time, and the camera follows the ROUS that noses around in a very natural manner, but there are 6 cuts there that you never even notice.
I’m certain that it’s something very much like Sage Rat’s explanation, and came to the same conclusion independently. I’ve seen the illusion used too many times in movies and TV shows before Princess Bride. See, for example, the original version of the Menzies film invaders from Mars, which uses it pretty frequently. (The Martians have hidden their saucer in a sand pit). Pretty clearly there’s a relatively thin layer of sand covering up a sheet of something with a slit in it (probably a single slit, rather than a cruciform slit, I suspect – something has to keep that sand from fall through easily), through which the actor can pass. Pretty clearly the actor has to pass through before all the sand goes through, but you can practice o get it right, or use multiple takes.
Somewhat similar is the “quicksand” effect they used to use in movies. The “quicksand” doesn’t resemble real quicksand at all – it’s actually bits of cork (or, I suspect, nowadays some sort of plastic foam) floating atop a tank of water. The thickness of the “sand” is actually only one thin layer, and I suspect that actors using such a “cork tank” have to move carefully to avoid leaving big open gaps in the “sand” layer that would give the show away. Sometimes they use this effect to simulate things going through sand, as in the old Outer Limits episode The Invisible Enemy (the one with the pre-Batman Adam West*). The giveaway in this case is that things emerge from the “sand” with a telltale sheen of water on them.
*Adam West’s second time on Mars – he’d been in the movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars just before this. Or just after it.
Pssst. Real quicksand is wet.
I have only seen movie quicksand. What does the real thing look like, when someone’s in it?
Hopefully not too much of a hijack… but in the book it’s called snow sand and it finer than talcum powder.
I’m not sure how you got the impression that there are no cuts. The camera angle changes noticably several times during the scene.
The sand in the film is nothing like real quicksand, to see the real thing in action take a look here and here (videos of Bear Grylls showing how to escape from quicksand). It is very slow and very wet.
I’m probably one of the few people here who has voluntarily spent a long time in quicksand. At the U of I civil engineering department one of the geotech grad students built a large quicksand tank that we used to demonstrate the “quick condition” at engineering open house each year (huge event for kids to get them interested in studying engineering). I spent all day in the tank a few times.
Quicksand is basically plain old sand in water, with a hydraulic head (pressure) coming up from beneath. In nature this would come from something like a spring, or it can be caused temporarily due to earthquakes (shaking the water). At a certain point the pressure is enough to cause the sand to lose cohesiveness and you basically get individual grains of sand suspended in water. The sand doesn’t have the normal resistance you associate with walking on the beach, it’s more like a very dense fluid and you float like a cork in it - the density of the fluid is several times that of water. In an earthquake-induced quick condition you’ll often hear of things like submerged storage tanks popping to the surface (they float right up) or buildings tipping (they become bouyant and are unbalanced).
For comfort’s sake we used warm water. It feels like floating in a thick, grainy fluid - it is not sticky nor does it “suck you down”. Because it is so dense it’s a bit harder to move quickly than you would in water, but you also float extremely well. We tried to get my chin below the surface and with me pushing down on the sides of the tank and a 250+lb man pushing down on my shoulders we could just barely do it. When we let go I popped up like a kickboard that was held under the water.
It was a lot of fun and very relaxing.
We also had a small tank about 18 inches deep with a set of rubber boots in it and a valve on the water supply. People would step into the boots and it’d be like standing on damp sand. We’d turn on the water and the sand would liquefy, they’d sink to the bottom of the tank. As soon as the water pressure was turned off the sand became a cohesive mass again and they couldn’t pull their feet out - they could actually lean far back without falling over since their feet were firmly buried under all that sand.
As far as appearance goes, it’s nothing special. It’s a lot of sand in water and in nature the water would probably look dirty.