The Impossible Mirror Scene in 'Contact'

Terminator 2 also used another set of twins. When the T-1000 mimics the security guard, they're both seen on screen simultaneously in a couple of scenes. Not CGI but identical twin actors.

I'm impressed that the Terminator's CPU wasn't covered in thermal paste! How do they cool it?

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that they had to do the shot this way so the camera wouldn't appear in the mirror. That is a great example of film making at its best: so immersive, you don't even notice they had to do something special to pull it off.

No doubt the excellent book it was based on had an overwhelming contribution to the overall success of the movie.

The book is even better. As great a science educator as Carl Sagan was, I think he was a better science fiction author. I only wish he wrote more of it.

Ellie makes a mind bending mathematical discovery at the end of the novel that puts the whole story in an even vaster context. The movie skipped it. It's almost as egregious as Peter Jackson skipping the scouring of the shire.

I can’t think about this movie without revisiting that existential dread and hopelessness that I felt halfway through. As someone that was in government contracting at the time, it was quickly followed by a strong contender for my favorite line from any movie ever.

I feel the same way. Highly underrated movie in my opinion.

The whole just kidding, we have another spaceship plot device loses a lot of points for me but I remember liking a lot of it.

The commentary talks about the decision making process for the opening sequence specifically about how risky it was to just have absolute silence for such an extended length in a feature. It was an absolue brilliant choice and really helps deliver the effect of how far way the camera moves.

If you loved Contact, you will love Arrival too - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/ ...

Come to New Mexico and visit the VLA. It's even more impressive in real life.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array

Awesome thanks that’s really helpful! Reading the article I had to google what a “focus puller” was, like did they have their hand on the lens turning the focus wheel the whole shot down the hallway? That video explains it much better.

Though I’m not sure why in Contact the focus puller had to be painted out of the entire shot, maybe they couldn’t get behind the camera in the hallway?

There is a boatload of stuff that you can't really appreciate until you've tried to make a movie yourself. When you've actually gone through the process of setting up a shot and looking at the horrible result you get a much deeper appreciation for what it takes to make something that looks even half-way non-amateurish, let lone smooth and polished. The thing that always drops my jaw is the settings of period pieces, particularly ones that have a lot of vehicles and old buildings in them. I know it's mostly CGI nowadays, but the quality is just ridiculous nowadays. I can't tell what is CGI any more, and I know what to look for.

(The movie I made about 15 years ago that was my substitute for film school: http://graceofgodmovie.com/)

No, I think you're the ideal audience member. To become so engrossed in the movie that you notice no artifact is the goal of most moviemakers. (I've studied filmmaking for 30 years.)

The same director, Robert Zemeckis, made Cast Away. There's a scene where Tom Hanks has removed the tape from a videocassette and tied strips of it to a tree, as streamers, to tell him when the wind changes direction. The strips of tape are blowing in the wind, and slowly they start blowing over to the other side, to show that the wind has finally changed direction. (He needs to know this as part of his plan to sail away.) Anyway, the tape was all computer animation! I guess they couldn't get it to act how they wanted with real tape and some fans. So they painstakingly animated it, and I would have never known, had I not heard it on the behind-the-scenes commentary.

I love this long shot from Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Mirror" starting at 0:32

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dA60D-j290

i'm glad it uses a gif. it's straight to the point, it plays in a loop, you can't control the playback, cant pause it, cant seek forward, cant tell how long it lasts.

if it used a video, its likely the developer of the site would be encouraged to add: a beginning countdown timer before the clip played (video will start in 3, 2, 1, .. you arent sure if the clip has audio or not so you hit Pause and never see the clip), a distracting progress bar showing how long the clip lasts, messing up the anticipation for not knowing when the clip ends, killing all suspense.. and finally, about 1 second before the video is over, a little popup that shows Whats Playing Next, and a countdown timer starts playing for the next clip. This is best case scenario.. worst would be a 2 minute ad before the video starts.

video on the web isn't a 'solved problem'. What if I want to play a video that uses indexed color? No video codec I know of supports that. Can I trust that the video I just encoded in h264 with ffmpeg will play on the web, or, or do I need to test first to see if it will play? Will it work on all browsers? Is my codec listed on https://cconcolato.github.io/media-mime-support/ ? and on and on. the simplicity of a gif makes perfect sense here.

For what it’s worth, there is an embedded video at the top of the page that I assume is the full clip, but when I clicked it, it just showed a loading spinner. When I scrolled down I was pleasantly surprised to find gifs (that worked) accompanying the text.

You should check-out filmup if you’re interested in the art of film making: https://twitter.com/filmupco

It's really interesting how scenes are actually filmed.

yeah ha, it's not your everyday weather map bluescreen.