So I’m bored, its Sunday night. A friend was supposed to hang out with me tonight but never called (cough cough Mr. Montes) so I’m bored. I decide to watch War of the Worlds again. There is a scene that was mentioned in every review I read last summer. Every critic marvelled at the seamlessness of the interior dialogue and exterior driving shots as the family drives down the highway in the stolen van. Every critic had a sort of “gee whiz – how the hell did Spielberg do that all in one shot?!” line. So I’m watching it and it hits me – every time they transition from inside to outside it isn’t a smooth zoom… well…it is smooth – but not in a straight line. It curves around the van, thus the A-pillar serves as a transition from the exterior real highway shots to the interior blue screen shots. The A-pillar makes a clean enough swipe from left to right and vice versa for any average CG artist to splice the shots together. The trick in making an “impossible seamless shot” is to make it SEEM seamless (no pun intended), while in reality it never is. Just like how the zoom-out from a dime on the sidewalk to the solar system always speeds up and blurs a bit when trasitioning from the helicopter shot to CG.