MovieChat Forums > Memphis Belle (1990) Discussion > This movie MUST be a practical joke!!

This movie MUST be a practical joke!!

posted 2 years ago by Egosomnia (858)
2 replies | jump to latest

I'm lost for words. I can only think that the producer had a warped sense of humour and wanted to piss somebody off by making a ridiculous parody of that somebody's favourite movie genre.

Truly, I can't put it into words. One thing stuck with me. In shots of the actors in front of their plane's windows there were OBVIOUS still backdrops of planes..... just static shots of planes, sitting there in the sky, painted on the backdrop, while in the foreground the actor's plane was "moving about"...

I can't go on......

[–] moviechatterer (15583) 2 years ago

I think thats "perspective"
Its the same reason that some things appear smaller but in fact are just "far away"

[–] Egosomnia (858) 2 years ago

Well duh!! ;)

Yes I'm sure the spfx guys hoped they could get away with it, hoping that people would think "it's the perspective". But take a look at those scenes. The plane in the background is utterly stationary. Planes always change their orientation while in flight. They'll rotate very slightly, in response to the pilot's controls. And they'll always rise and fall very slightly simply because of the airstream variation.

BUT the toy planes in this movie are rock-solid, static, unvarying, etc etc.. There's not a millimetre of position or orientation change. All the motion is in the foreground shot of the actor in the cockpit.

Mind you, I'm talking about the scenes shot from inside the cockpit, and the gun turret. In those, you see the window behind the actor and the toy planes in the distance, supposedly flying in formation. But they're cgi backdrops - and still shots at that.

Btw, my friend uses a model compositing program called Element 3D. He can drop an animated model into a scene and make it look real. He agrees the shots in this film are pure amateur.