When Pascal and Romaine were dancing on deck and Pascal gets shot in the neck with an arrow...how did they do that effect?
I took a couple of looks at it, and I can't figure out how they did this one scene.
Any ideas?
I've looked at that too, even slowed it down frame-by-frame on the DVD (a Region 2 French disc), and still I can't quite see for certain what they did. Presumably they had a marksman shoot a fake arrow with a suction-cup tip that would stick to the actor's neck, which seems obvious and logical, but even in slow motion it's hard to see much clearly. The whole thing only took a second and it's still a bit blurred even when slowed down. But the effect is very realistic and cool-looking.
Pascal was played in his film debut by actor Booth Colman, who died last December at age 91. If you watch the scene closely, just before he's hit you can sort of tell he knows what's coming (as, obviously, he does), because he has a slightly frozen smile on his face and is somewhat stiff in his movements, clearly setting himself up for the arrow strike.
I did the same thing, going frame by frame and I couldn't quite tell either.
I was wondering if it was animated, but I just can't tell if that's the case. However they pulled it off, it worked.
Definitely not an animated sequence -- Booth Colman's really being hit by a fake arrow. But it's damn convincing! You can still see it "in" him when he falls.
Maybe the other poster's Throne of Blood explanation is similar. But that was a much more involved take and most of the arrows stuck into Mifune's body area, where faking a hit is relatively easy. (They did a couple such shots in The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938, for example.) Striking someone on his bare neck (which is also a much smaller target) is something else again.
In "THe Big Sky" I don' know, But, here is a similar scene 5 years later from Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GvVzvoEx4w
and its explanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGxz1-I4MIY
I hope it helps.
KIAI ... please.
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