How the cool mirror shot in 'Contact' was filmed
I've always thought this movie trick was pretty cool. Watching this video by The Brothers Lynch reminded me of it so I decided to look it up on YouTube to see if there was any explanation of it. Thankfully there was.
RoboCop and traditional matte painting effects in movie-making
An old video I'm revisiting mainly because I wanted to see again how the special effects people made all the practical movie effects in RoboCop. I was reminded of this when I saw something about matte paintings recently and I recalled how RoboCop's OCP headquarters were painted on top of Dallas' City Hall building to look like an arrow smashing into the ground.
The video starts off with the matte painting aspect and then goes into the creation of the design of the ED-209 robot. One of the things I didn't remember from watching this video previously was that there were a big and small version of ED-209 which were both used in the film. The big one was oddly shaped due to its size and it resulted in a sort of shrunken head (you'll see this side by side in the video).
The other thing I find completely fascinating is that even the muzzle flashes on ED-209's gun were practical effects. It's so easy for gun flashes to be made in post-production these days that I take for granted how difficult it must have been to make a muzzle flash in-camera back before digital took over. Crazy stuff!