10 Movie Scenes With Hidden Tricks You Totally Missed

10. Indiana Jones: Raiders Of The Lost Ark - The Ark’s Shadow

There’s a gag in an episode of The Simpsons about painting horses to look like cows because they look more like cows on film than actual cows do. It’s a great joke that gets even funnier when you hear about behind the scenes stories that kind of agree with this philosophy.

Steven Spielberg’s directing and Douglas Slowcombe’s cinematography work on Indiana Jones make use of a lot of silhouettes and shadows to incredibly memorable effect. This includes lighting locations, characters and props. One particularly well-shot sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark is when Indy and Sallah locate The Ark and, hoping to get away with it before they're discovered by the Nazis, carefully attempt to move it out of its temple.

Instead of using the intricately designed prop itself, in order to better retain its silhouette, actors Harrison Ford and John Rhys-Davies instead moved… a cardboard cut-out. And, because they were professionals, they acted like the thing was heavy even though they were just moving paper by holding onto cardboard struts.

It helped to show and frame the shape of The Ark, providing a much clearer silhouette for the camera and thus the audience as opposed to the big, bulky chest itself.