How did actor George Reeves fly in the 1950s-era Adventures of Superman television show? How did the effects improve when actor Christopher Reeve flew through the air as the same superhero in 1978? And how do Maleficent, Spiderman, Peter Pan, and other characters from fantasy and science fiction take to the sky?
If you’ve ever watched a movie or tv show and wondered how those acrobatic flight scenes are created, this clip-filled Insider video shares behind-the-scenes examples that cover the last seven decades.
Today, a variety of tools and technological options are available: strategically placed wires, stunt rigs, blue and green screens, twisting tuning forks, precisely programmed robotic arms, gravity-defying digital doubles, highly-trained stunt teams, and more. But the trick to making flights believable is to use these techniques in scene-specific combinations.
Stunt performer C.C. Ice (actor Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff stunt double in the Marvel universe) explains many of these tricks and effects throughout the video.
The video is one in the Movies Insider video series that shares how movies are made.
Watch these related videos next:
• Disney Imagineering’s autonomous robot stunt doubles
• How did animators create the Spider-Verse?
• How they made Fred Astaire’s famous dance scene in Royal Wedding (1951).
• The roller skating scene from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936)
• Buster Keaton – The Art of the Gag
• Foley art: Designing sound for a scene from Zootopia
• Stop-motion animation goes high tech at Laika
Bonus: Madeline the Robot Tamer.
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