10 Amazing Practical Movie Effects Shots Everybody Assumed Were CGI
4. The Floating Pen - 2001: A Space Odyssey
Movies don't get much more ahead of their time than Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi opus 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that remains a towering benchmark for ground-breaking visual effects - and still looks spectacular today.
One of the film's most memorable images is that of a pen floating in the space shuttle.
One could assume Kubrick simply employed cutting-edge compositing techniques to insert the pen into the shot during post, but in truth, this was completed 100% in-camera.
The trick was devilishly, brilliantly simple: the pen was attached to a sheet of glass with double-sided tape, while crew members simply moved the sheet of glass around to simulate the pen's movement in zero-gravity.
And so, when the air hostess plucks the pen out of thin air, she's actually subtly detaching it from the glass - if you look closely you can even see a slight jerk as she un-sticks it.
Perhaps more than any other scene in the film, this confirms the absurd creativity of Kubrick and his production team. At this point, filmmaking truly transcends the form to become a beautiful magic trick.