4 Behind the Scenes Facts About Filmmaking

by Kevin Gardner

When many of us go to see a movie, we take it in for the two or so hours that it plays, then go home. It's hard to wrap your head around the fact that whatever you just saw likely took months, and maybe even years, to be completed. From the writing to the directing to final edits, filmmaking is a complex industry. Here are a few cool things that go on behind the scenes of movies. 

1. Is Anything Real?

One of the best things about a good movie is the way that it takes the viewer into another world and makes them believe the story they're seeing. Most movie-goers are aware that what they're seeing isn't real, but you might not be aware of just how much you're seeing is fake. For example, most cigarettes you see being smoked on shows like Mad Men are fake cigarettes, because real ones just wouldn't last long enough to shoot entire scenes. Movie sets can be rough places, requiring a lot of special equipment like a rugged laptop and tarps to keep expensive cameras from being damaged. 

Most of the food you see on set isn't real, and actors will fake chewing to avoid having to really eat the same things over and over again. Items like cocaine, alcohol, sweat, and blood are replaced with harmless counterparts, and that mirror you saw being punched by a bare fist was probably plastic or even sugar glass. Of course, it might take less effort to have the real thing on set, but providing a true-to-life counterpart that won't hurt anyone and works for the movie is a big part of the prop master's job. 

2. Kid Actors

If you've ever seen a movie starring very young kids, you might have wondered how they got someone too young to understand the full context of a scene to cry or emote on command. Particularly in horror movies, it might seem like the child should be too scared or confused to know how to act. That's why on most sets, the scenes are presented to the child actor as a game. Rather than saying "stand here and laugh maniacally", they're told to run around and play in the hopes that it will conjure real laughter. Child actors may not even be aware of the genre of the movie they're in until they've seen it later on. Using GPS for fleet can sometimes help directors keep track of where their actors and crew are on larger sets. 

3. Sound Effects

One of the most fascinating parts of movie production is seeing how the sound effects are made. So many of the sounds you hear in a movie that seem 100% real are actually done in a studio by an entirely different person. Sound effect mixers will use tons of different materials to achieve the effect they want, experimenting until they get the sound just right. For instance, any time you hear bones breaking in a fight scene, you might really be hearing someone snapping a stalk of celery into the microphone. And the ominous sounds of someone walking down a long hallway were probably all done by the sound effect department, walking in time with the actor to achieve realism. 

4. CGI or Miniatures?

Today, it's almost expected that when you see an impressive view of a city from overhead, it's all done with CGI. But doing CGI can actually get too expensive to be worth it in every situation, so many studios will create miniatures of large scenes to create the same effect. You might be surprised at how many huge castles are actually the size of a dollhouse. And those scary, stormy skies over the big city might just be milk injected into water, then overlaid with whatever is going on in the scene.

Such effects might be going out of style, but it'll always be amazing to know what filmmakers have achieved in the past. Knowing these secrets should make us appreciate the art and hard work that go into producing a movie.