10 Genius Movie Tricks You Totally Take For Granted
8. Faking Water With Light & Wires - The Shape Of Water
The opening scene to Guillermo del Toro's Best Picture-winning The Shape of Water is a dreamlike tracking shot of protagonist Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) sleeping in her apartment while it's inexplicably submerged underwater.
It's a gorgeous shot which, with seemingly hundreds of gallons of water in play and a ton of objects floating around the apartment, most surely assumed was almost entirely CGI, right?
But if you guessed that Sally Hawkins was simply shot floating in the air against a green screen and then composited into the digital apartment environment, think again.
The overwhelming majority of what you see here was done practically in-camera, believe it or not. The big conceit? There's actually no water in the shot at all - it was filmed as "dry-for-wet."
The set was filled with smoke and lights were projected from above to give the impression of refracted light shining around as it would in real water.
All of the props in the scene were on wires, as was Hawkins, with eight puppeteers working in tandem to make every object convincingly float.
The only major digital elements in the scene were bubbles and fish seen throughout the apartment, and also Elisa's hair, which was replaced to make it look free-flowing as it would in actual water.
The end result is nothing short of astonishing, and while most surely assumed it was concocted on a farm of computers, that's largely far from the truth.