10 Genius Movie Tricks You Totally Take For Granted
6. Combining A Miniature Train With A Giant Diary - Bram Stoker's Dracula
Bram Stoker's Dracula is the sort of lunatic production that could've gone so horribly wrong in another filmmaker's hands, but with Francis Ford Coppola at the helm, it ended up one of the most visually striking films of the 1990s.
The movie's visual complexity is such that nobody could be blamed for assuming that Coppola simply deferred to cutting-edge CGI - this releasing just a year after Terminator 2, after all.
However, Coppola was adamant that the production be completed without CGI, to the extent that he fired the entire VFX team and instead hired his son, Roman, to execute every effect practically in-camera.
And perhaps the single most impressive shot in the entire movie is one that's easily pawned off as a relatively basic VFX image - at least by modern standards.
Early in the film, when Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) takes the train to meet Count Dracula (Gary Oldman), there's a gorgeous shot of the train travelling across the horizon with Harker's diary placed in front of it.
Bizarrely, the train's billowing smoke casts a shadow on the page, and the orange glow of sunlight is also reflected on the paper, which of course makes no practical sense given that the perspective implies the diary is close to the camera while the train is far away.
Yet this wasn't produced digitally - instead, a miniature train was combined with a painted orange backdrop and, most impressively, a gigantic prop diary.
Using forced perspective, this gives the impression that the diary is much closer to the camera than the train while still allowing the shadows and lighting to splash onto the page.
It's a phenomenal effect and one which clearly took a huge heft of effort, and yet one that the overwhelming majority of viewers wouldn't think twice about.