For those who were curious, an expert reveals how actors manage to convincingly pretend to be dead.
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After a listener inquired, the co-host of the podcast The Rest is Entertainment, Marina Hyde, researched how actors manage to convincingly pretend to be dead, after all, it can’t be easy to remain motionless for so long.
Those who watched Game of Thrones, for example, might wonder how actor Kit Harington managed to remain so still during filming of scenes of his character, Jon Snow’s death. According to Hyde, this is not such a simple process and requires a lengthy process to portray a dead body.
Hyde emphasized that in the past, films and TV shows avoided capturing shots of the actor’s chest due to breathing movements. Nowadays, thanks to advances in visual effects, it’s possible to create the effect of a motionless body by filming a scene of the chest “at rest” and then overlaying “the rest of the footage.”
The same technique is used to film scenes where the actor ‘dies’ with open eyes’, to make it perfect, the editing removes the blinking movements during the shots. A visual effects technician confirmed this practice on social media, where people have long speculated about how actors pretend to be dead.
“I’ve stopped blinking, moving, and pulsating the skin of many ‘corpses’ throughout my career in visual effects,” he commented, while another user added that much of the work is done ‘in post-production’ of the programs.
This content was created with the help of AI.
