Does the movie "A Mirror to the End" really need post-editing?

At the beginning, "a mirror to the end" usually means that there seems to be almost no editing, which completely breaks the rules of montage. There was no switching, no fighting, and one shot recorded the whole event from beginning to end. Pay attention to just "watching" without post-editing. In fact, many so-called "one mirror to the end" films are a combination of long shots and montages. However, they often use various post-technologies, which make the editing points difficult to detect and form a seamless viewing effect. Simply put, a veritable "mirror to the end" = the whole movie is a single long shot without post-editing; Pseudo "one mirror to the end" = multiple long shots+post-editing/special effects.

In the film history, the acme of "seeing a leopard in the mirror" is the Empire State Building shot by American pop artist andy warhol. 1964, he aimed the camera at the Empire State Building for 485 minutes without changing his position. Regardless of the technical limitations such as the length of the film at that time, the film reached the trinity of "single shot+fixed position+fixed scene", expressing the avant-garde thinking of subverting the traditional by deconstructing montage editing art.

? The earliest drama film showing the consciousness of "seeing the mirror to the end" belongs to the film "The Rope of Death" shot by the urchin Hitchcock in 1948. Also limited by the length of the film (at that time, 35 mm long film could only record about 10 minutes), the desire to shoot movies with a single long lens could not be realized at that time. The Dead Rope is not really "a mirror to the end", but a combination of more than a dozen long shots edited in the later period. When shooting, once the last roll of film is used up, stop shooting, aim the lens at the back of an actor (or sofa or corner) and put on a new film. This makes the murder story adapted from real events smooth and coherent, and the suspense master firmly locks the audience in the thrilling plot trend.

Birdman was directed by academy award for best cinematography winner Emmanuel (Gravity, Birdman, Return). Lubetzki plays the leading role, and the so-called "One Mirror in the End" is also composed of a large number of long shots, and the longest real shot in the film is only more than 7 minutes. The difficulty of long lens shooting is closely related to the flexibility of the camera. Hitchcock shot "Death Rope" in the early days of color movies, and the lens was very large. In order to adapt to the action of the lens, the props outside the lens are constantly moved. For more than half a century, cameras have become more and more flexible, and their motion range and trajectory are more comfortable. There are two Alai cameras used in Birdman: one is Alexa M operated by Lubetzki, equipped with a 4:3 image sensor, and the brightness is 1250 ASA. This small camera is mainly used for hand-held shooting and can enter the core area between actors; The other is Alexa XT, which is used by photographers of camera stabilizers to take more objective and distant photos. ?

In order to present the perfect appearance of A Mirror to the End, Birdman has made great efforts in post-production. How to sew a long shot into a "one shot" is the primary problem in the later period. Technicolor, who is in charge of stitching shots, sews the "single continuous long shot" that has been done very well in the editing stage better, and creates "DI tangents" to meet the needs of DI (digital middle, an important link in film production) and stitches these "DI tangents" together. In addition to splicing, the rhythm of comedy movies is also the key to the success of the film, and one of the major problems of "A Mirror to the End" is that it is easy to cause rhythm procrastination. In this movie, when a scene is not attractive enough, or the rhythm deviates from the design, the editor will adjust the movie rhythm by speeding up and slowing down the camera rhythm.

In addition, the staff in the locker room mirror will be "dug" one by one later. The most representative is the lily-colored bridge between naomi watts and Andrea Rispolo in the background of the theater. All the staff are exposed in the mirror. Ivy Agregan, a visual effects artist, said in an interview: "We have to dig out the staff and then put the elements back through photogrammetry. This requires a lot of dynamic sketches and a lot of work. " It can be seen that the flowing "A Mirror to the End" is actually a complex and exquisite "special effects blockbuster", and the active exploration of shooting mode and film language needs strong film industry support.