10 Clever Tricks You Didn’t Realise Movies Played On You
3. Little Shop Of Horrors' Slow-Mo Lip Synch
For its time, 1986's Little Shop of Horrors was absolutely phenomenal in how it depicted its larger-than-life carnivorous plant, Audrey II. Even now, the film holds up ridiculously well and is never anything short of being an absolute hoot - complete with a plethora of ludicrously catchy songs.
While the end result is great, the filming process wasn't exactly the smoothest when it came to Audrey II, especially for those scenes when the giant plant was in a shot where it was interacting with a cast member.
The major problem during these moments was that, especially for the singing scenes, Audrey II's lips didn't match the pre-recorded songs being played. To get around this issue, those sequences were filmed in slow motion and then sped up so that Audrey II's movements matched the music.
Making this even more impressive, that meant that the actors involved in such scenes had to lip synch in slow motion as an ever-expanding SFX crew yanked and twisted the Audrey II construction along with the action. To Little Shop of Horrors' credit, this is absolutely one of those tricks that you would have zero idea of upon simply watching this Frank Oz feature.
Fun fact: in order to make the movements of the Audrey II puppet in “Little Shop of Horrors” look realistic, the plant was filmed at 12 frames per second and then sped up to 24 frames in the final cut, which meant the actors in those scenes had to perform and sing in slow motion! pic.twitter.com/b5bxTe355P
— Sarah McGonagall (@gothspiderbitch) October 6, 2020