If you’ve never tried your hand at filmmaking, you might assume that its hardest visual challenges are the creation of effects-laden spectacles: starships duking it out in space, monsters stomping through major cities, animals speaking and dancing like Broadway stars, that sort of thing. But consider the challenge posed by simply capturing a scene set in a bathroom. Almost all such spaces include a large mirror, meaning that most angles from which you could shoot will violate an important rule cited by Youtuber Paul E.T. in the video above: “Don’t show the camera in the shot.”
Yet we’ve all seen major motion pictures and television series with scenes not just in bathrooms but other mirror-equipped spaces, from rooms used for interrogating suspects to rooms used for preparing to come out on stage. What’s more, the camera often passes blithely before these mirrors with a vampire-like lack of a reflection. The techniques used to achieve such shots are now mature enough that we may not even notice that what we’re seeing doesn’t make visual sense. How they work is the subject of Paul E.T.‘s investigation, beginning with an episode of Criminal: United Kingdom in which a camera somehow floats around a room with a one-way mirror, never appearing in that mirror.
Another more familiar example comes from Contact, directed by the visual-effects maven Robert Zemeckis. In its early flashback sequence, an adolescent version of its astronomer protagonist runs toward the backward-tracking camera and reaches out to open what turns out to be a bathroom medicine cabinet, into whose mirror we must have — yet cannot possibly have — been looking into the whole time. What we’re seeing is actually a seamless fusion of two shots, with the “empty” (that is, blue-screen-filled) frame of the cabinet mirror superimposed on the end of the shot of the young actress running toward it. While not technically easy, it’s at least conceptually straightforward.
Paul E.T. finds another, more complicated mirror shot in no less a masterwork of cinema than Zack Snider’s Sucker Punch, which tracks all the way around from one side of a set of dressing-room mirrors to the other. “What you’re actually seeing when the camera moves is the transitioning from one side of a duplicated set to the other,” he explains, “with an invisible cut spliced in there” — which involves lookalike actresses literally trying to mirror each other’s movements. No such elaborate trickery for Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure, which shoots straight-on into a bathroom mirror by building the camera into the wall, then digitally erasing it in post-production.
While we do live in an age of “fix it in post” (an instinct with an arguably regrettable effect on cinema), mirror shots, on the whole, still require some degree of foresight and inventiveness. Such was the case with that scene from Criminal: United Kingdom, which Paul E.T. simply couldn’t figure out on his own. His search for answers led him to e‑mail the episode’s B‑camera operator, who explained that the production involved neither a blue screen nor doubles, but “a combination of well-choreographed camera work and VFX.” The result: a shot that may look unremarkable at first, but on closer inspection, attests to the subtle power of movie magic — or TV magic, at any rate.
Related content:
The Art of Creating Special Effects in Silent Movies: Ingenuity Before the Age of CGI
This Is What The Matrix Looks Like Without CGI: A Special Effects Breakdown
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
