10 Movie Scenes That Totally Tricked Your Brain
5. The Floating Speeder Was Achieved With Mirrors... And Vaseline - Star Wars: A New Hope
The original Star Wars is such an impressive technical achievement that audiences are liable to believe that just about everything fantastical they're watching is a complex, expensive visual effect.
Case in point, the side-on wide shots of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) driving through Tatooine in a speeder appear to the naked eye to have been achieved by painting out the wheels on the bottom of the prop vehicle.
But George Lucas actually had an elegant practical solution, which involved placing a long mirror in front of the wheels to reflect the dusty environment and imply the vehicle was indeed levitating off the ground.
To ensure the end result looked seamless, Vaseline was also rubbed over a camera lens filter to provide a slight blur to the speeder's base, which the crew nicknamed "the forcefield."