Ever wondered how they made the Titanic look so...titanic? You were being TRICKED, that's how!
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00:00Filmmakers have found a ton of different ways to gloriously fool those opting to take in their
00:06picture. Some of the finest directors of their generation made their sets look massive, and
00:11actors looked like they were speeding through the streets via some truly wonderful tools and tricks.
00:17So I am Gareth, this is WhatCulture, and here are 8 even more movie scenes you didn't realize
00:23were tricking you. 8. Sophia Lillis
00:26wasn't available for the ending, so they blue-screened her in.
00:30Dungeons & Dragons Honor Among Thieves
00:32Last year's Dungeons & Dragons Honor Among Thieves turned out to be one of 2023's biggest pleasant
00:39surprises, with the fantastic big-screen adaptation of the titular role-playing game containing a ton
00:45of charming characters, thrilling action, and just the right amount of silliness. One pleasant surprise
00:51no one actually spotted during that Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daly-directed flick,
00:56however, popped up towards the end of the D&D ride. As noted by Francis Daly on X, almost a year after
01:03the critical hit underperformed at the box office, the wonderful Sophia Lillis wasn't actually available
01:09to shoot the ace hero shot involving her druid Doric, Justice Smith's sorcerer Simon Omar, and Michelle
01:15Rodriguez's barbarian Holger Kilgore. So, to get around her absence due to having to shoot Wes Anderson's
01:21Asteroid City, Lillis shot her moments in front of a blue screen. The film's masterful VFX team then
01:27seamlessly added her into the scene afterwards. If you didn't know any better, you'd assume Lillis was
01:32very much there on the day, jogging alongside her co-stars when this brief team-up moment was
01:37originally shot. But you were actually just being brilliantly tricked via some good ol' movie magic.
01:42What was your favorite flick of last year? Was it Dungeons & Dragons, Honor Among Thieves,
01:47or something else? You let me know in the comments section down below.
01:517. They used Selena's voice instead of J-Lo's, Selena
01:55The prior version of this secret trick-stuffed list mentioned how Ben Affleck once found his
02:00voice being surprisingly dubbed over during one of his first real big-screen roles. And it turns out
02:06his equally famous wife, Jennifer Lopez, also experienced something similar during the making of the 1997
02:12biographical musical Selena. Lopez played the titular singing superstar in the movie that told the story
02:18of Selena Quintanilla's meteoric rise and eventual death at just 23 years old. However, though Lopez would
02:25go on to forge her own rather iconic music career, she didn't actually perform the majority of the
02:30warbling seen in the scenes in the finished flick. Unlike Affleck, Lopez was well aware of the fact the
02:36production had opted to dub Selena's real singing over the actor's performances in the movie. But the
02:41majority of those who have sat down to watch the flick since its release in the mid-90s, though,
02:46likely had no idea they largely weren't actually listening to Jenny from the Block's impressive
02:50voice here. J-Lo sang just three words in the entire movie, kicking off the Como LaFleur song at the
02:56Monterey concert. Other than that, all of the magnificent singing heard in the movie that helped make
03:01Lopez herself a superstar came from the late great Selena. 6. An inflatable crowd was used, the king's
03:09speech. In a perfect world, just about every director on planet Earth would prefer to bring
03:14in an entirely real capacity crowd for those big screen moments involving a large group of people
03:20sitting in one place. But gathering over a thousand extras together for the shooting of one scene
03:25sometimes just is not possible. So when it came time to capture the moment, Colin Firth's King George
03:31VI, stuttered his way through a speech at Wembley Stadium during Tom Hooper's 2010 eventual Oscar
03:37winner The King speech, the call was made to bring in some blow-up backup. That's right, many of the
03:42folks seen watching The King in this opening scene weren't actually folks at all. They were inflatable
03:48extras. These full-of-air extras were first used for Seabiscuit in 2002, with Joe Biggins being the
03:54person behind what would ultimately become known as the Inflatable Crowd Company. Each blow-up doll is given a
04:00mask and costume before being seamlessly added into the background, alongside some real people to fool
04:05you into thinking you were watching a fully alive crowd. So next time you check out this king's first
04:11speech in the flick, just know that he's also being watched by 1,500 Inflatables.
04:165. Giant rings were used for close-ups. The Lord of the Rings
04:20It's no secret that the marvellous Peter Jackson and the rest of the terrific crew who helped bring
04:25the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the big screen were fond of a little tool known as forced perspective.
04:31These optical illusions help fool folks into believing that what they're seeing is either
04:35bigger or smaller than it actually is in reality, with the great Sir Ian McKellen often being positioned
04:40much closer to the camera in order to make his hobbit co-stars look smaller, for example.
04:45But one lesser-known use of that magical trick can be found during a few of the scenes involving the
04:50One Ring the Fellowship are trying so desperately to destroy once and for all. For some of the
04:55moments that required the process to be in a close-up shot, a massive version of the little
05:00gold piece of jewellery was made, though not in the fires of Mount Doom, presumably. In fact,
05:05a staggering 40-plus different versions of the One Ring were created by Jen's Hanson jewellery for
05:11the iconic features in the end, with viewers being tricked into thinking they were watching a
05:15little ring of power during the movie's opening, for example. It was actually a huge 8-inch One Ring
05:21to rule them all here. Cheers for checking out this video today, hit that subscribe button down
05:26below if you want to see more Watt Culture on that screen. This is not a trick.
05:31Number 4. The Actors Weren't Actually Driving During Certain Moments
05:35Baby Driver
05:35Baby Driver
05:36While it may have often looked like Ansel Elgort's baby was doing much of the drifting and speeding
05:42himself through our Edgar Wright's exhilarating ride that is Baby Driver, that was largely just
05:47one big high-speed trick. You see, though the Actors seen reacting within these vehicles during the
05:52various chase and escape scenes were very much present within the cars during the shooting of
05:57the scenes, they weren't actually required to do as much driving as you think. Instead,
06:01the majority of the perilous screeching and flying down roads was performed by stunt driver Jeremy Fry,
06:07who often found himself strapped into a cage above the vehicle as he genuinely pushed the
06:12pedal to the metal above the Actors being shot on camera below. Having Fry be the one in control
06:17of everything the car did during these moments meant that Elgort, Jon Hamm, and whoever else was
06:22seated in the automobile could purely concentrate on their performance. Sure, the star bringing Baby
06:27to life did get to perform a few of his own stunts, ones that didn't put his co-stars at risk at least,
06:32but a ton of that close-up getaway driving action was actually done by a fearless person sat on top of,
06:38or the side of, the speeding car. Now you know.
06:42Number 3. The Pencil Trick Wasn't Actually CGI The Dark Knight
06:46Easily one of the most iconic magic tricks ever to pop up on the big screen, Heath Ledger's ability
06:51to make a pencil suddenly disappear in The Dark Knight is about as chilling as it gets.
06:56For such an utterly sickening moment of brutality then, you'd be forgiven for assuming that even the
07:01very much anti-CGI Christopher Nolan would have had no choice but to resort to using digital wizardry
07:07to pull off the moment, Heath Ledger. Or maybe they used prosthetics to achieve the gruesome killing
07:12of a henchman by the Clown Prince of Crime. Nope. The team behind the project actually just shot a
07:17version of the scene with the pencil very much on the table, and then one without it. When Heath
07:22hit table, no pencil was present of course, though a few of the shots Nolan wanted did still require
07:27actor Charles Jarman to quickly knock the pencil away before his skull came crashing down on the
07:32table, a move that resulted in Jarman being knocked out a few times. Thanks to the magic of editing,
07:38most viewers were left presuming they'd simply witnessed some rather slick CGI in the finished
07:43flick, when in reality this was actually a surprisingly real trick created through masterful
07:48editing and a bit of occasionally painful stunt work.
07:51Number 2. Short Extras Were Cast To Make The Set Look Bigger, Titanic
07:55Joining Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack and Kate Winslet's Rose on the doomed ocean liner known as the
08:02Titanic, were an awful lot of guests and crew members. So James Cameron was always going to
08:07require a ton of extras to fill out the background in various scenes during his eventual 1997 hit.
08:13Instead of booking a great many inflatable dummies to chuck into these moments however, Cameron had to
08:18hire the real deal didn't he? But it was during that extras casting process when the director had a
08:24brilliant idea. The mind behind Avatar and Aliens obviously wanted to get as much value as possible
08:29out of his rather expensive and already quite large set. His plan? Only casting extras that were under
08:355'8". With these shorter actors tricking audiences into believing they were taking in a set that was
08:41even bigger than it actually was. In Cameron's own words to the Los Angeles Times,
08:46we only cast short extras so it made our sets look bigger. Anybody above 5'8", we didn't cast them.
08:53It's like we got an extra million dollars of value out of casting. Though even that creative casting
08:58trick still couldn't stop the movie from becoming the most expensive one ever made at the time.
09:03Number 1. A Fully CGI Horse Was Secretly Used At Points
09:07Mulan 2020
09:08Make no mistake. A lot of very real horse riding definitely went down in the 2020 live action
09:14remake of the Disney classic known as Mulan. And a ton of said travelling via horse was performed by
09:20the star bringing the titular warrior to life on screen, Ife Lu. However, there was a moment there
09:25when the actor wasn't actually able to hop on her steed. With Mulan being required to jump onto her
09:31horse, Black Wind, and ride it through rough snow at one point in the movie, it was clear that this was
09:36a sequence that needed to be created digitally. So Ife ultimately hopped onto a mechanical book as she
09:42galloped in front of a green screen for the scene, involving Mulan escaping an incoming avalanche.
09:47From here, the geniuses at Imageworks went about creating a super realistic digital version of
09:52Black Wind that Ife would then be seen convincingly moving on in the end.
09:56The end results are so damn believable, it's still tough to accept that the gorgeous horse seen
10:01racing away from the digital snow here is also an entirely CG creation. But you better believe that
10:07particular horse was anything but real, folks. And you were being remarkably tricked during this
10:12particular ride.