The rain magic

As already mentioned - kind of.

Strobes are used to change your perception of continuity, so that you *see* still drops, instead.

And the going backwards trick is done by changing the strobe frequency in such a way that it creates illusion of going backwards, by first seeing the drop#1 at one height, than in the next strobe drop#2 at higher height (but that is not the same drop as drop#1) and so on.

If you ever looked at the car's wheel in motion and had the illusion it spins backwards, but the car is moving forward? Yep, the same trick.

Scientifically, it has to do with Nyquist's sampling theorem and aliasing distortion that creates such illusion.

But, it is very complicated, you need to know speed and wind/direction of drops falling down, which, say, isn't *that* hard given it was an artificial rain.

There was a small version of this trick in the Macau magic shop. It can be done for real on a small scale making the water droplets appear to be rising.

As I know, only with a virtually accurate and consistent frequency with a small scale.

C'mon guys!!!! It's a movie and they don't expect you to believe everything in it. You guys are talking like this scene is ridiculous, they ralready ruin the magic and all. But c'mon, the director wanted to enhance the quality value of movies, he wanted to give that extra substances for the movie, giving that every movie nowadays has their own special scenes.