From bearded ladies to chocolate syrup.
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00:00 Cinema is all an illusion, actors are playing a part till locations are fabricated, and dialogue is written to sound snappy and engaging.
00:08 When the illusion works, it can result in truly immersive and deeply engaging experiences that allow you to suspend the tedium of modern life.
00:17 But it takes more than just great writing and direction to transport an audience to fantastical worlds of imagination.
00:24 Practical effects, in-camera tricks and various other techniques are all used to fool audiences into believing what they're seeing is real.
00:32 I'm Jess from WhatCulture and here are 10 bizarre ways directors tricked audiences.
00:38 10. Under the Shape of Water - The Shape of Water
00:42 Director Guillermo del Toro is known for favouring practical effects and elaborate set designs over the use of CGI.
00:49 His approach to filming the 2017 romantic fantasy The Shape of Water was no exception.
00:55 The film opens with a wonderfully hypnotic camera move that glides through a subterranean apartment, submerged beneath the ocean.
01:02 Sea animals swim throughout a collection of furniture, floating in the tranquil aquatic environment.
01:08 The effect is dreamlike and highly convincing.
01:11 Immediately, one would think this could only be achieved through the use of highly sophisticated CGI.
01:17 In reality, it was all a physical set.
01:21 All the household objects were suspended by a system of pulleys, which could be manipulated to give the appearance the objects were floating.
01:29 The illusion of rippling water was achieved by casting light at different intensities through various thicknesses of smoke.
01:35 The pulley lines were then removed in post-production and after a nifty bit of colour correction, the illusion was complete.
01:42 9. Looks Awfully Cold for Vietnam - Full Metal Jacket
01:47 Stanley Kubrick was a filmmaker unshackled by genre and was able to tackle a range of themes and styles with equal efficiency.
01:55 But he was known as something of a difficult director.
01:58 One of his most intriguing eccentricities was his unwillingness to travel.
02:03 Disliking Los Angeles and favouring London over New York, Kubrick spent the latter part of his career in England, where he could make movies close to his home.
02:11 This posed some difficulties when it came to filming his Vietnam War movie, Full Metal Jacket.
02:17 Transforming areas of London to appear like South East Asia was no easy task, and required extensive and highly detailed sets, with hundreds of imported palm trees and other tropical plants.
02:30 But there was another unforeseen issue that required a bizarre solution.
02:34 Much of the filming took place in the winter months.
02:37 The actors became so cold that their breath was visible on camera.
02:41 To counter this, Kubrick had an array of giant heaters positioned just off screen, to blast hot air at the faces of Matthew Modine and Adam Baldwin.
02:51 Although it worked for the most part, there are several moments where you can still see Cowboy's breath.
02:57 8. Dancing on the Ceiling - Inception
03:01 Christopher Nolan's movies often come with a fair amount of mind-boggling concepts, whether that be narrative twists, ambiguous plot points, or his use of visual trickery.
03:11 At one point, the Inception crew are shown fleeing in a van while Arthur is unconscious.
03:17 The van crashes and flips, which causes the dream world to start rotating.
03:22 Arthur is then forced to duke it out with a bunch of dream henchmen in a spinning hallway.
03:27 In order to create this effect in camera, Nolan got his production team to construct 100 feet of hallway suspended inside a giant spinning rig, with a camera attached to the floor.
03:39 As the rig spanned, the actors were forced to move from the floor to the wall to the ceiling, creating the illusion that gravity was being manipulated.
03:48 7. I Drink Your Milkshake - There Will Be Blood
03:52 There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece of scriptwriting, acting, and set design.
03:56 It's perhaps one of Daniel Day-Lewis' most iconic roles, and includes a remarkable amount of quotable lines.
04:03 But the "I drink your milkshake" line has far more significance than one might think.
04:08 Multiple scenes involved the characters being drenched in viscous oil.
04:12 For obvious reasons, the filmmakers couldn't use actual oil.
04:15 Not only could it be potentially harmful to have actors covered in the liquid, but not even an artistic endeavor such as this was worth wasting gallons of the precious fuel.
04:24 So what did they use as a substitute?
04:27 Paul Thomas Anderson revealed it was the same stuff they put in chocolate milkshakes at McDonald's.
04:33 Gallons of chocolate syrup were used as a base to make the sticky, thick liquid.
04:38 Depending on the scene, different formulas were concocted with varying consistencies.
04:43 Shots of the oil spraying into the air used a fairly watered-down formula, whereas a thicker concoction was used when the actors required a good drenching.
04:52 6. The actors weren't always acting.
04:56 Platoon
04:57 Oliver Stone's Platoon was hailed for its harrowingly realistic depiction of the Vietnam War.
05:02 The film captures the desperate struggle of young men wrestling with the notions of lost innocence, humanity, and moral ambiguity in a most inhuman environment.
05:12 To get the group of actors ready, Stone put them through a rigorous boot camp that lasted several weeks.
05:19 During that time, they were tasked with digging foxholes, sleeping in the jungle, being subjected to night ambushes, and surviving on army rations.
05:28 Not only did this create a sense of camaraderie among the cast, it gave them an insight into the experience of the soldiers they would portray.
05:35 But towards the end of this boot camp, Stone played a pretty ruthless trick on his actors.
05:41 The cast was given a bunch of coconut moonshine to celebrate the end of their ordeal.
05:46 They all got stinking drunk in the jungle, with the understanding that the next day they'd be taken to a hotel to recoup, before the shoot began.
05:54 The next morning, Stone had his exhausted and boo-soaked actors taken further into the jungle, where they spent the whole day filming marching scenes.
06:03 Throughout the movie, the Platoon is shown slogging it through the jungle, exhausted, covered in sweat, and generally miserable.
06:10 But that wasn't acting. In reality, they were all just hungover as hell.
06:15 5. The Lord of the Forced Perspective – The Lord of the Rings
06:19 Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a landmark in the history of cinema.
06:24 Not only did it change how the fantasy genre was regarded, but it made leaps in filming techniques, both in terms of CGI and practical effects.
06:33 With dwarves and hobbits sharing the screen with elves, men, and orcs, conveying scale was exceedingly important.
06:40 Shots that didn't require close-ups often utilized the help of scale doubles, but several more intimate scenes required characters like Frodo and Gandalf to be shown together.
06:50 Jackson used an in-camera technique known as forced perspective to sell the illusion.
06:55 If Gandalf and Frodo had a scene where they sat opposite each other, Wood would be positioned further away from the camera and McKellen would be closer.
07:04 The actors would be given props according to their size. Some would be larger in scale and others smaller.
07:10 Providing the camera was positioned correctly, this would have the effect of making the characters appear as if they were different sizes.
07:17 But as soon as the camera moved, the illusion would fall apart.
07:21 The production team therefore devised a motion control rig which allowed them to pan the camera while also moving the actors on a dolly and maintaining the sense of scale.
07:31 Oliver Reed was one of the greatest British actors of his generation.
07:39 His overtly macho and domineering presence on camera made him obscenely watchable in any role, but one of his greatest performances was also his last.
07:49 Partway through the production of Ridley Scott's epic Gladiator, Reed died.
07:54 Throughout his career, he'd been known as something of a hellraiser, and after taking part in a drinking competition with a bunch of Royal Navy sailors, five of whom he beat in an arm wrestling contest, Reed suffered a heart attack.
08:06 Rather than recasting the character, Scott made the decision to use a combination of body doubles and a three-dimensional CGI mask of Reed's face to complete his movie.
08:16 Proximo's final scenes were mostly rewritten to utilize previously recorded but unused lines of dialogue from rehearsals.
08:24 The final results are almost unnoticeable in the movie.
08:27 Considering this was done at a time where this kind of technology was still in its infancy, it's one impressive achievement.
08:34 Peter Jackson had many ways to fool his audience into believing his Hobbit actors were the size of children.
08:44 One of the most effective methods was by utilizing a very simple trick known as the Texas Switch.
08:50 This technique was usually used to trick an audience into thinking a character is performing an impressive stunt.
08:56 By using camera blocking, a stunt performer is switched out with the main actor, without the need to cut the shot.
09:02 Peter Jackson used this same technique when it came to selling the idea of scale.
09:06 In Return of the King, Denethor hurls Pippin from the houses of the dead when he attends to burn Faramir.
09:13 Pippin is shown from behind as Denethor grasps and throws him.
09:17 He then rolls out of frame to re-emerge facing the camera.
09:20 A scale double was used for the first half of the shot and Billy Boyd was given the direction to pop into frame when his double rolled onto his back.
09:28 If you watch closely, you can see the exact moment where this happens.
09:37 Since the early days of filmmaking, directors have had the task of depicting environments that simply don't exist.
09:44 With a franchise like Star Wars, creating the fantastical worlds of galaxies far, far away has been essential in telling the stories.
09:52 But obviously, production crews don't have the luxury of shooting on location in an alien environment.
09:58 In the past, a combination of physical sets and CGI-generated backgrounds have been used to depict the many worlds in the story.
10:05 With The Mandalorian, everything changed.
10:08 Rather than having actors working in a green screen environment, the production crew used huge LED screens standing 21 feet high and 75 feet in diameter in an enclosed indoor space.
10:21 It's a similar concept to the projection technology used in the Golden Era of Hollywood.
10:26 However, the LED screens are able to generate an almost 3D-looking environment, which not only can be captured on camera, but also allows for an actor to be lit by their surroundings.
10:37 Some of the most memorable moments in Peter Jackson's (yes, he's back again) Lord of the Rings trilogy were the huge battle sequences during the War of the Ring.
10:49 CGI had reached a point where thousands of individuals could be depicted on screen, in wide-sweeping shots that showed the sheer scale of the events.
10:58 No other moment was as awe-inspiring as the Charge of the Rohirrim during the Siege of Minas Tereth.
11:04 Although many of the sequences required the use of CGI, Jackson still wanted to capture as many live-action shots as possible.
11:12 In an instance of life-imitating art, a call was put out across New Zealand, summoning every able-bodied horse rider to muster outside the town of Twizzle and take part in the scene.
11:23 Initially, around 250 riders showed up, but over time, many had to depart due to other commitments.
11:30 The production was left with around 150 riders who appeared in the final film.
11:35 However, many of the riders were actually women. Every day before shooting, they'd be fitted with costumes, which included false beards to disguise them as warriors of Rohan.
11:45 That's the end of our list, but let me know down in the comments if you can think of any other bizarre ways directors tricked audiences.
11:52 As always, I've been Jess from WhatCulture. Thank you so much for hanging out with me.
11:57 If you like it, you can come say hi to me on my Twitter account, where I'm @JessMcDonald. But make sure you stay tuned to us here for plenty more great lists.
12:05 lists.