Correcting Movie Mistakes

Here from Ridley Scott's epic 'Gladiator', you can see a big 'movie mistake' on the back of the chariot. In all the action, the gas cylinder that was used to thrust the chariot over has become visible as it dislodges its hiding place.

The likelihood is that it was just missed when the director viewed the rushes and then it was too expensive or too late to re-shoot the scene.

The point is that these things can happen at any stage in film making and noticing them before release is the hard part. However, once you have spotted a mistake, you can either choose to ignore it or you can correct it in post-production (but this can be costly and time consuming - so your budget and deadline might suffer).

If you do choose to ignore the errors and bury your head in the sand, you are only inviting criticism on the production values of the shoot. Just because YOU didn't originally notice the mistake, does not mean that an audience with fresh eyes will miss it as well.

All too often a big film will go out with some pretty big 'known' mistakes, but when you have the pressure of a big studio breathing down your neck, it is a risk you have to take into consideration.

This is a before and after comparison of a mistake that crept into the shooting of Light Rain.

The scene shows people taking shelter from a heavy deluge. We had two big rain towers providing rain FX in front of the cast, but in the distance and out of focus we did not have the need for any rain FX. There is no point in spending money to wet down an area that is not clearly visible...but it did mean that in the background we found a rouge pedestrian happily walking across the set during a take. Clearly it was a small problem, but one that was ruining the shot.

Here we had our story saying that the rain was so bad that people needed to take cover...and then, just in the background we had a figure slowly meandering across the concourse with no umbrella! Clever!

So we decided to correct this shot. Fortunately we had the expert knowledge of VFX supervisor (and all round nice guy) Blake Winder. Blake has worked on some really epic Hollywood films from Hellboy 2 to 10,000BC, so digitally removing this figure was not going to pose any problem for Blake...in fact he did it in a few hours with a fairly simple mask.

Yes, it is such a small detail to remove...and yes, it did take extra time and budget...and yes, most people might not have noticed the figure or perhaps they would have been too distracted by the rest of the action in the shot. But in my opinion it is the small details that matter. It is the fine refinement and attention to detail that others wouldn't have bothered to correct that takes a film to a more polished level...and ultimately it makes for a better final film.