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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

shooting into a mirror without reflection?

S

scott william

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I’ve seen a few films lately where the camera shoots directly into a mirror but there is no camera/crew reflection. How are they doing this? I saw it a lot in Birdman and the French film Force Majeure
 
Money.

In the case of "Birdman" you are talking about visual effects to erase the reflection of the camera & crew as it crosses the mirror.

There is no magic bullet here, you WILL be reflected in any mirror in a frontal angle, you have to move to one side to get out of the angle of reflectance. So any time you are seeing a mirror but not the camera in the mirror, some trick is involved. For example, maybe the camera is actually in the reflection but obscured -- the lens is looking through a hole in the wall, for example, or the camera has been dressed out with set decoration or something to disguise it. Or maybe what you see in the reflection is another mirror on the opposite wall, but that is a one-way mirror with a camera behind it ("Being There" did this for a greenroom scene.) Or the camera is barely off to one side to get out of the reflection, maybe on a long-lens to reduce parallax. Or maybe there is no mirror at all, just an empty frame looking into another set dressed to look like the mirror reflection ("Peggy Sue Got Married" opened and closed the movie with this trick, the camera is over the shoulder of a double who is matching all of Kathleen Turner's moves so that they look like mirror reflections.)

Or maybe it involves erasing the camera out of the reflection. Or putting the reflection into the frame of the mirror in post.
 
Motion control is probably not the least complicated solution to the problem, but I had fun making it. Check the mirror at 11s when the boy runs from the bathroom. :)


A bit of a brain bend to play with mirror camera moves and positions. But the rule of thumb is to think that the refection camera is exactly the same distance and angle as the real camera, but on the other side of the wall...
 
Depending on the shot, this can also be accomplished with a Swing/Shift lens, although I've never actually tried it.

My absolute favourite shot involving mirrors is in Contact...such an amazing shot.
 
In the days "BCG" (before CG), director Francis Coppola did a mirror shot for Peggy Sue Got Married where they just duplicated the room through a piece of glass and had a stand-in for the actors. It's a beautiful, beautiful stunt:

 
Thanks guys. The Peggy Sue example is impressive.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Or maybe it involves erasing the camera out of the reflection. Or putting the reflection into the frame of the mirror in post.
Click to expand...

Yeah, just did that for a week till my eyes where bleeding - no fun, especially when the camera is not locked down - next time I shoot different.
 
Elias Tejeda said:
Anyone try this with tiltshift lenses?
Click to expand...

Canon 24 TSE for photography-worked fine. Haven't tried ith cinema applications, though, but locked off should be of some use, at least and that lens is arguably Canon's sharpest.
 

I shot this music video back in 2010. Most of it was a 5D mark II that I had mounted onto a helmet. In order to establish the POV shots as the main character we started off looking straight into the mirror. I was wearing the helmet cam as well, so my arms are the ones that you see. We basically shot the mirror scene by placing some tracking marks on the mirror, and just performing the whole thing shooting my own reflection. I then flipped the camera around, locked it off, and got the JFK to do the same actions looking straight into the camera. This was our reflection. I then Camera tracked the reflection into the original shot. We finalized it by adding some flyers and other things taped to the mirror. Very fun shoot.
 
Norm Li CSC (he frequents REDuser) shot a first-person movie called Grace that (for obvious reasons) has tons of mirror shots even in the trailer... Maybe he can chime in...

Hold on let me go find it on vim-vim.

EDIT: Got it... Grace (trailer)
 
I noticed a whole bunch of snafus there with peggy sue... I think enter the void is a great example. during the intro they do that...
 
I filmed this scene with a swing/shift. It looks like I'm right on his shoulder in the foreground.

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Stefan Scherperel said:

I shot this music video back in 2010. Most of it was a 5D mark II that I had mounted onto a helmet. In order to establish the POV shots as the main character we started off looking straight into the mirror. I was wearing the helmet cam as well, so my arms are the ones that you see. We basically shot the mirror scene by placing some tracking marks on the mirror, and just performing the whole thing shooting my own reflection. I then flipped the camera around, locked it off, and got the JFK to do the same actions looking straight into the camera. This was our reflection. I then Camera tracked the reflection into the original shot. We finalized it by adding some flyers and other things taped to the mirror. Very fun shoot.
Click to expand...


Awesome music video, great job
 
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