Inverted image??

[John Burgess]

I have often wondered how the inverted image threaded up on our projectors projects right side up. Presumably it’s the Magic of our hobby. Any ideas??
John

[Steve Klare]

It's just the nature of lenses: they work by bending light and as a natural result they end up flipping the image upside down in the process.

Actually our eyes do the exact same thing: what we see on our retinas is actually upside-down from reality. It's the very sophisticated software inside our brains that flips it back over according to which direction our inner ears is telling the brain is "down". What's really cool is if we ourselves are upside-down, the brain still fixes the image.

(What happens in deep space I have no idea!)

It will be a long time until technology produces a camera as wonderous as a pair of human eyes in decent condition. Quite often when I look out at some amazing scene and flip a viewfinder up to my eye I realize it just can't take it all in quite the same.

[Paul Adsett]

I think I read somewhere that babies actually see everything upside down for a few weeks after birth, until the brain decides to invert the image on the retina.

[Ed Gordon]

(What happens in deep space I have no idea!)

It gets even weirder in deep space where there is no up or down, and you can't hear anything since there is no atmosphere to carry the sound. This results in very boring battles in outer space. 🤐

[Steve Lee]

When I was at school years ago, we entered a TV film making competition by making a music video film on super 8. The whole thing was animated, but we needed to find away of opening it that was different.
Once we had the main animation back from the lab, we knew it was safe to go a head and film the opening sequence. At this point there was no going back.

We took the background canvas from the animation and placed it on a easel. With the camera now mounted on the tripod upside down, we filmed somebody painting over the canvas with white paint.

When this footage was spliced into the main film, the correct way round, it meant the canvas starts off white, and also in the correct orientation with the footage playing backwards. So with every brush stroke it revealed the canvas painted backdrop.

[Brian Fretwell]

Also with the old "Plate" cameras the photographer composed and focused on a ground glass screen before replacing it with the photosensitive plate. He had to do that with the image inverted. That's the reason reflex cameras have a mirror between the lens and the viewer.

[Steve Lee]

I think one of the greatest pieces of inverted cinematography has to be from Royal Wedding (1953). When Fred Astaire performs the song " You're all the world to me ". So clever.

[John Burgess]

Thanks for interesting responses.Steve , really enjoyed the clip , absolute genius and no sign of CGI !!!
John

[Steve Klare]

Derann had it:

DANCING ON THE CEILING From “Royal Wedding”. 1 x 200ft. Col Price code D

-one I wish I'd gotten while it was still possible!

Yes, CGI takes a lot of work to make right, but back in those days the Studios really had to make their special effects out of nothing but the reality they had all around them. This was an entire room mounted on a gimbal along with the camera, cameraman and lighting, and Fred Astaire had to time his steps with their tumble. (-and let's hope the cameraman had a strong stomach!)

-can you imagine how audiences reacted the first time they ever saw this?!

[Ed Gordon]

Steve's post sent me into research mode. Here is what I found:

The filming of Astaire's famous scene was apparently entirely undocumented, so these clips are the closest thing we have to a true "behind the scenes" look at how the effect was achieved.

Notes on the video:

I began "Astaire Unwound" as a pet project, and am proud that it came to be included in the "Comédies Musicales" exhibit at the Philharmonie de Paris!

It's no great secret how Fred Astaire was able to literally “dance around the room” in Stanley Donen’s 1951 movie Royal Wedding. The hotel room set was constructed inside a huge rotating steel cage, all the furniture was bolted down, and the camera and cameraman were strapped down and traveled around 360 degrees while Astaire danced away, always remaining upright as the room rotated around him.

But the more you think about it, the more amazing an accomplishment this number seems. The cage must have had a diameter of something like 20 feet, and the light fixtures had to stay powered throughout. The whole thing must have weighed a ton or two. Building this set was an enormous feat of engineering. What would it look like to a bystander as this amazing scene was shot?

To try to answer that question, I took the scene from the movie (left) and performed a little video trickery (right). I did three basic things:

1. Stabilize the footage. I tracked the light fixture in the middle of the back wall, and kept it stationary onscreen while the camera frame moved around it.

2. Recreate the room. I took stills from throughout the sequence, looking for Fred-less fragments of the set that I could piece together to make one "clean" image of the entire room. I also made two image “patches” so that the photo could appear in both the locations Astaire leaves it during the sequence.

3. Rotate the room. I put the stabilized footage on top of the recreated room, and then tried to figure out exactly when the room was being rotated. Admittedly, there was a bit of guesswork here, but I've got it more or less correct. I tried to err on the side of restraint, only rotating the room when it was inarguably so. It seems to take about 4 seconds for the huge cage to rotate 90 degrees.

In creating this, I of course watched the dance many times, and have a few observations:

0:27 - Astaire twirls the desk chair around here; after the cut at 0:37, this chair would be bolted down so it would rotate with the room. And it must have been attached quite firmly too, since Astaire hangs from it at 1:40.

0:55 - There are several moments like this one where Astaire seems to play with the notion of “defying gravity”. It's certainly possible that the room was rotated counterclockwise just a bit at this point. But from much experimentation with the timing, I think it's more likely that the room moved definitively in increments of 90 degrees only. (See note at 2:45 below.)

1:39 - Notice that when Astaire lands on the "ceiling" after jumping the light fixture, one of the fixture's lights blinks on. Was there an electrical short?

1:42 - With a bit of a tug, Astaire pulls the photo down from the desk. What kept it in place? Magnets, according to Stanley Donen.

1:45 - There's a camera shake (probably due to the set beginning to rotate), and the ceiling light that came on at 1:39 goes back out.

2:17 - There's a fairly obvious cut here to a closer shot. This number feels like one continuous take, but in reality the dance section is pieced together from three different shots. (See 2:45 below.)

2:19 - Astaire now casually places the photo against the right wall, where it will stay in place magnetically while the room is rotated again.

2:45 - Another cut. This is quite a remarkable one, as it passes by virtually unnoticed as one watches the scene. Both Astaire's positioning and the camera framing were extremely close from one take to the next, making the cut almost undetectable. It’s interesting to note though that throughout the number, the room rotates 360 degrees clockwise, then 270 degrees counterclockwise, then 270 degrees back clockwise. Before it switches direction each time, there’s a cut. Was it necessary to somehow “shift gears” on the rotating cage to get it to switch directions, which necessitated these cuts? If so, it's a strong argument against any counterclockwise rotation at 0:55.

3:30 - Astaire easily snatches up the photo again to bring the number to a close.

My goal here wasn't to "spoil the secret"; as I say, I think it's fairly well-known how the scene was accomplished, and not too hard to figure out anyway. I just hoped to make it a little easier to visualize what went into the making of this piece of Hollywood history.

Source: https://www.bigfott.com/astaire-unwound

In 1986, director Stanley Donen recreated the "rotating room" effect he originated in 1951 for Fred Astaire's famous ceiling dance in "Royal Wedding".

[Ed Gordon]

Thanks for interesting responses.Steve , really enjoyed the clip , absolute genius and no sign of CGI !!!
John

CGI does not produce that "Wow!" effect because we know it's just computer animation. The old effects worked better by tricking us with perspective, matting, et cetera.

How Silent Movie Special Effects Were Done

[Brian Fretwell]

I believe the same, or similar, rig as Royal Wedding was used by Kubrick in 2001 a Space Odessy for the flight attendant in the shuttle to the orbiting space station when she turns 90 degrees up into a corridor.

[Chris Bird]

Fascinating! In terms of Royal Wedding, this is something that was first done in 1919 for the Douglas Fairbanks film TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY, directed by Victor Fleming. The scene appears 9 minutes and 42 seconds into this youtube link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjXDMQ5OfF0