[quote=“Peter_Morris, post:93, topic:832137”]
This shot from Airplane. You can probably guess before you click.
[/QUOTE]Which I believe was a riff on this scene at the close of Silver Streak, in turn inspired by a famous 1953 incident at Washington Union Station.
Oh, yeah, as a railroad nut and Buster Keaton fan I [del]own a copy[/del] am quite familiar with the work. Much the same as The Train, the company bought a disused logging railroad in Oregon and basically trashed the whole railroad. Besides the stunts there’s the sheer scope of the movie, like whole armies passing behind him while he chops wood, oblivious.
And don’t forget the countless comedy bits like his girlfriend discarding a chunk of firewood from their dwindling supply because it has a knothole in it, trying to cross the street while (another) whole army rushes by, or Union officers ineptly trying to fix a wrecked switch.
Reading Benson’s Space Odyssey reminds me of another pre-CGI effect that I love – the Centrifuge on the spaceship Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There have been lots of other examples of using a “live” kinetic rotating set to allow people to defy gravity (Fred Astaire in 1951’s Royal Wedding, Lionel Ritchie in "Dancing on the Ceiling, an old episode of The Avengers, but nobody used it as comprehensively and intricately as this example (not even the case earlier in the film when the stewardess on the Moon ship Aries rotated 180 degrees).
They built the biggest centrifuge they could in two mirror-image sections so that they could but a camera mount in it to allow the camera to shoot things from the astronaut’s POV as he ran around the interior (Think about it – unless your camera is at the bottom of the centrifuge, part of it is going to show. They avoided this by having a black strip down the middle of the centrifuge “floor” through which a metal support could hold a camera so it wasn’t at the bottom. The apparent black strip was the slot through which this support ran, between the two halves of the centrifuge, disguised by material that snapped back into place after it passed the support, so it looked like a painted black line).
They also had an arrangement where the camera could stay in one fixed spot and shoot the astronaut running around the periphery. In one bravura shot they strapped actor Keir Dullea practically upside-down seated at a table while actor Gary Lockwood descended a ladder on the opposite side of the centrifuge, then walked around the periphery to where Dullea was. In reality, of course, Lockwood climbed down the ladder onto the centrifuge which rotated the set as he walked at the lowest point until he reached Dullea, who rotated around until he was upright at the bottom of the set.
It’s simple in description, but incredibly complex and problem-fraught in real life, what with keeping the two halves moving at the same rate, keeping everything moving smoothly, projecting “screen saver” displays onto the fake computer screens, and dealing with the exploding illuminating lights (which didn’t deal well with being turned upside-down while they were running hot).