| Multiple Mirror Effects in Movies | ||
Inception (2010) |
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| Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film. |
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This film won the Best Motion Picture of the Year Oscar as well as three others, including Best Achievement in Visual Effects, for scenes such as this one. Dom Cobb is a corporate espionage outlaw who steals secrets from the subconscious of his victims in shared dreams, but this time he plans to plant an idea into the mind of a man in the dream. He can't create it himself, so he hires a college student named Ariadne to design the architecture of a shared dream. When he is first teaching her how to build a realistic dream world with him as the subject whose subconscious is projected in the dream, they are both wired up and dreaming that they're walking around in Paris. Still learning what she is capable of doing in the dream, she decides to have a little fun and messes with the physics of the dream world by bending the streets and buildings overhead, defying gravity, then closing two large mirrored doors in the middle of a bike path so they face each other making an infinite mirror. Then she puts the palm of hand on one of the doors to smash the glass. In 2021, Inverse.com interviewed DNEG, the VFX company that created the mind-bending visual effects in the film, with a section on the "Hall of Mirrors" scene, in which they explain that instead of only using CGI, they also used a real mirror that was about 15 feet across, and weighted about two and a half tons. Then they painted out the film crew that was visible in the reflection. They also had to computer-generate what is seen in the reflection using still photography. The scene starts at about 31:40. You can watch in on YouTube. |
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