When mirrors and guns don't line up

[red4]

You see it all the time, a character will be standing about 8 inches left of a mirror so that his/her face will be dead center from the vantage point of the camera. Or when someone is aiming a rifle at a far away target, but you can tell he/she is really aiming it about 50 degrees away. It's always obvious, cartoonish, distracting, and completely unnecessary.
Why do directors and/or cinematographers always do this?

 

[Art Andrews]

Photo example?

 

[red4]

Photo example?

You mean you've never seen this?
It's nebulous in my mind as something very common, but off the top of my head are 2 examples.
1. in Black Hawk Down, a "Skinny" aims an RPG at one of the helicopters. You can clearly see he's aiming at something out-of-frame, but he turns and "aims" when one of the helicopters enters the frame in the background sky. It looks very awkward.
2. In Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories episode 3 opens with the battle of the Alamo, and a US soldier aims his rifle at a group of Mexican soldiers coming in through a wall. He blasts one soldier, but you can tell he should have hit the wall about 8 feet in front of the soldier.

All I can say is, look out for scenes with mirrors, and scenes where a gun and its target are in the frame together.

 

[Treadwell]

"Looking in a mirror" is a trick that can't be done any other way without CG or something. If you want the audience to see what the character sees when he looks in a mirror, he has to look at the camera in the mirror so we see him looking right at us. (Since we can't put the camera in his head.) In the back of our minds we know he doesn't really see himself but we pretend.

As for guns, I guess it's on-set safety. Firing blanks directly at someone is dangerous.

 

[Sandman0077]

I absolutely HATE when I see this. I'm what you would call a 'realist' when it comes to movies. If it is a movie that is 100% fantasy, ok then I get it, it is fake.

But if it is supposed to be a real world story, then I can't help but nit-pick at stuff like that. My wife hates it because I will always point out stuff like 'he's not even aiming at that guy' or 'is he ever going to reload that thing?'.

Like stated above though, I guess there's really no way around it without CGI.

 

[Jaitea]

The mirror fix can be done if you are smart about it, in T2 when Sarah Connor operates on the switch/chip in the T1000, this shot used the benefit of having two Sarah Connors (Linda Hamilton & twin sister Leslie)

No CGI needed for this scene......or mirror, just a window with both sets of actors mimicking each others moves

J

 

[red4]

That's not what I mean about the mirror. I can't think of a movie right now, so here's a diagram.

It's not supposed to be an over-the-shoulder angle, like you guys are assuming. It's a 3/4 angle from behind.
View A is the way they usually shoot mirror scenes, placing the actor's face directly in the center of the reflection from the audience's perspective. But to achieve this, the actor has to stand offset from the center.

View B is the way it would really look from our perspective if the actor was standing centered. He would see himself centered, but we would see him offset in the reflection.

On that note, here's another blatant thing that always takes me out a close-up that involves contact lenses which are not meant to be contact lenses within the context of the movie (such as Legolas in LotR, and Brandon Routh in Superman Returns).

 

[John Hart]

I would have to say, "Get over it. Movies are not real. Movies are illusions." Do you nit pick theatre performances this bad? Accept that they are not mirroring reality and it is just a show and go on.

 

[Riceball]

The guns thing probably has to largely do with safety, as someone mentioned earlier, it's dangerous to aim even a blank firing gun directly at someone, just look at what happened to Brandon Lee. Then with your Black Hawk Down example, it's entirely possible that's an editing mistake and the scene was compiled from two wholly separate shots that were put together in the editing room but in reality were separated by time and space.

 

[red4]

I would have to say, "Get over it. Movies are not real. Movies are illusions." Do you nit pick theatre performances this bad? Accept that they are not mirroring reality and it is just a show and go on.

That doesn't work, because the mirror thing is entirely unnecessary, which is what makes it distracting.

 

[leafman]

*delete*

 

[John Hart]

The mirror thing is done for the same reason the star of the movie doesn't keep his helmet on all the time. Actors are being paid for their faces and their emoting skill. If the face is hidden where you cannot see the actor acting, why pay for that face and skill? Producers want to feel the money they've spent is being used properly. It goes along with "cheating" sightlines in a play or movie where the two actors are not looking at each other but looking more downstage so their facial emotions can be seen better and their lines can be heard. It's illusion, not reality. Stop trying to make it reality.

 

[LMFAOSchwarz]

This is reminding me of how I used to notice actors on shows would talk on the telephone, holding the "speaker part" (whatever it's called) down by the chin, presumably so as to not block their faces.