10 Movie Scenes That Totally Tricked Your Brain
6. Tom Cruise Isn't Really In New York - Eyes Wide Shut
Compositing is one of the toughest effects-based disciplines to pull off correctly.
Placing an actor in an environment they weren't actually present in is extremely difficult because perfectly matching the lighting and general conditions of the original footage is so challenging.
Also, our brains are extremely good at picking up on things like poorly matched lighting: we immediately know something's "off" if it's not consistent.
But ever the perfectionist, Stanley Kubrick went the old-fashioned rear projection route on his final film, Eyes Wide Shut.
Because Kubrick feared flying and consequently shot his films in the UK, he had to have the film's Manhattan setting precisely recreated on a London soundstage.
Yet for the shot where Cruise's protagonist Bill Harford walks down the New York streets, Cruise was actually just walking on a treadmill in front of a rear projection.
Because both the dynamic lighting and the speed of the camera's movements were matched so perfectly to Cruise, the overwhelming majority of audiences had no idea they were looking at two elements combined together.
As frustrating as Kubrick's obsessive eye for detail must've been for his cast, it also meant that the risky technical aspects of the productions were expertly controlled down to the most minute degree.