How was the staggering mirror shot achieved in ‘Contact’?
As the adaptation of a novel written by Carl Sagan – who also took a story credit – Contact was always going to be a thought-provoking sci-fi film. Beyond its narrative merits, though, director Robert Zemeckis also pushed the boundaries of visual effects.
Himself an innovator in that arena, having pioneered new techniques in movies including Back to the Future Part II and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, even an Academy Award-winning filmmaker like Zemeckis knew that his expertise alone wouldn’t be enough to realise his ambition, with no less than eight different VFX companies enlisted.
That included George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic, Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital, and Pixar, all heavy hitters in their own right. The first three minutes of Contact are entirely computer-generated, but arguably the most impressive example of digital manipulation present in the entire 150-minute running time comes from a shot as simple as tracking a character moving through their own home.
Jena Malone – playing the young version of Jodie Foster’s Ellie Arroway – runs upstairs to get medicine for her father. What appears to be a simple tracking shot eventually shows itself to be something else entirely, with Ellie opening the mirrored doors to the medicine cabinet, revealing a seamless transition into her own reflection. In a movie dealing with big questions and ruminations on humanity’s place in the universe, it’s quite the accomplishment for something as trivial as the opening of a cabinet to take the breath away.
The purpose of maintaining focus on Ellie’s reaction was to showcase her desperation and emotional state upon discovering her father has collapsed, without actually showing him on-screen. Unfolding in real-time as a single unbroken shot, Contact achieved its wizardry by seamlessly stitching two shots and a still plate together, making it impossible to see the joins.
The first is obviously the tracking shot, which ends when Ellie extends her hands towards the cabinet. However, the cabinet wasn’t actually there, with a blue screen placed where the mirror should be. The slow motion was a fairly standard case of upping the framerate, although the focus puller had to be painstakingly painted out of every single frame in which it was visible.
In the second shot, the camera is facing the cabinet – which was a blue screen on set – and pulls back at the same speed as the first. By filming both of them at an identical pace, they blended together to create the illusion of an impossible single take moving backwards while tracing Ellie on an upward trajectory through the house.
When Ellie enters the bathroom and opens the cabinet door, it obscures the mirror entirely from view, closing to reveal a reflected photo of Ellie and her father. Neither her initial reflection nor the photo was present during the shooting but added in post-production, meaning the addition of that entire shot came afterwards. It feels like a single take, but thanks to the trajectory of the cabinet door across the frame, it never once comes across as two separate shots.
It’s mind-blowing on an artistic and creative level, with two individual shots of vastly different lengths and a blue screen combining to create an incredible technical achievement that audiences weren’t even supposed to notice.
