Painting The Medium / Live-Action Films

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• Casino features a rather unique example. The characters of Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) and Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) provide offscreen narration throughout the movie. In one scene Santoro is narrating the action when his voice is interrupted—permanently—by a baseball bat onscreen.
  • Much of Martin Scorsese's filmography is filled of examples of this.
• Fight Club:
  • Includes a few frames of male genitalia to suggest that Tyler or another member of Project Mayhem is serving as the film's projectionist.
  • There are a few flashes of Tyler before he's introduced, possibly inserted into the film stock by the projectionist.
  • Tyler points to the "cigarette burn" on the film stock while the narrator explains how Tyler tampers with films.
  • In one of the first scenes, Tyler asks the narrator if he has anything to say, and the narrator says "I can't think of anything." At the end, we come back to this scene, but the narrator says "I still can't think of anything." Tyler replies "Ah, flashback humor."
  • While Tyler delivers his "You are not your job" monologue, his intensity causes the film stock to vibrate in the projector, allowing its perforations to become visible at the edges of the screen.
• The English sub of Night Watch does this with subtitles: various characters' subtitles are in different colors, and when a character shouts, his subtitles get bigger.
  • A particularly cool effect from Night Watch is the depiction of The Call, an ability that vampires have to call victims to themselves. This is rendered as a character getting a bloody nose in a swimming pool, and the floating blood forming the subtitles of the vampire calling her prey. When she finishes speaking, the bloody subtitles dissipate, then coalesce into her next line of dialogue.
• Grindhouse
  • Planet Terror has all sorts of old-fashioned movie theater effects within the normal footage: a missing reel, jumping scenes, burned film, and so on. Most of them are used as Relax-o-Vision.
  • Death Proof had a few scratches and another missing reel, although it was "found" for the DVD release. To make up for this, the DVD had a scene (not included in the theatrical cut) that was entirely in black and white, before fading back.
  • The theatrical release of Grindhouse as a double feature had, sandwiched between the two main films, ads for a fictitious Mexican restaurant and mock movie trailers for "Coming Attractions".
• At one point in The Impostors, one of the lead characters overhears a plot to blow up the ship in a foreign language. He hides under the bed, and understands the plan by reading the subtitles that were meant for the audience. And they pull it off without breaking the willing suspension of disbelief.
  • Something similar happens in a The Three Stooges film involving Martians.
  • And in Austin Powers in Goldmember, involving talking to a Japanese man and Austin reading the subtitles, made even funnier by strategically placed objects blocking the subtitles and turning innocent words into swears ("Please eat some Shittake mushrooms")
• Gremlins 2: The New Batch has a scene where the film starts to burn and Hulk Hogan comes out to yell at the Gremlins to start the movie back up. The VHS version features a different scene in its place, with your VCR breaking and John Wayne (depicted via archival footage where he is dubbed over by Chad Everett, since Wayne was dead by the time of the VHS release) and a Bugs Bunny cameo instead of Hulk Hogan.
  • The novelization had the "Brain" Gremlin lock up the author in his own bathroom to take over and talk about himself, only to flee when he notices him busting out with an axe.^note One wonders what sort of bathroom emergency requires an axe.
  • Someone made a fan-made version for a possible DVD scene. (The proper DVD release had the Hogan scene, with the Wayne scene included as an Easter Egg.)
• Be Kind Rewind: After Jack Black has become magnetized, he walks into a video store, and the picture goes wonky a couple of times while he's there. Mind you, this is a VHS video store he walks into...
• In the "shoot the cook" scene from Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the cook's blood splatters against the camera lens.
• This is also done in Braveheart during the fight scene after Wallace's famous speech, not to mention countless other films.
• A similar effect to Brother Bear was used in the live-action Disney films Enchanted and Oz the Great and Powerful, with the prologues using a different aspect ratio than the rest of the films.
• The scenes that take place in Kansas in The Wizard of Oz are presented in sepia, while all of the scenes that take place in Oz are in Technicolor.
• Done a few times in Doomsday, particularly Saul's head
• In the Russian comedy High Security Vacation, the opening credits initially pan over Japanese-esque drawings, starting as Japanese characters and then morphing into Russian letters stylized into Japanese characters. Then, as the camera moves through the prison where the protagonists are detained, the credits blend seamlessly into the scenery, appearing as writings on walls, trucks, and other objects.
• During a very frantic and drug-addled day in Goodfellas the editing and camera work shifts from the usual pacing to an equally frantic and excited style, mimicing the character's drug use.
• In Robin Hood: Men in Tights, the opening scenes have the credits spelled out in flaming scenery lit by arrows. The villagers are understandably distressed by this and one remarks, "Every time they make a Robin Hood movie, they go and burn our village down!"
• In Metropolis, on-screen text about an underground city of the poor scrolls down. Text about the skyscrapers of the rich scrolls up, and is shaped like a tower. In a story sequence, the text shines and bleeds.
• In the 3DMovie version of TRON: Legacy, the Grid is a 3D world, obviously, but scenes in the real world are filmed in 2D.
• District 9 seems to love splattering the camera with blood every time someone gets shot. Sometimes justified in that portions of the film are in mockumentary form, using footage that was recorded in-universe.
• Tango: The film opens, after the opening credits play over a panning shot of Buenos Aires at sunset, with Mario in his apartment. He then pulls a book out of his desk...the screenplay of Tango. Mario then reads how the opening credits of Tango will play over a shot of Buenos Aires at sunset (which they did) before cutting to him in his apartment, looking pensive (which he does).
• There's a lot of this in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Sound effects are written on-screen, musical instruments give off waves of sound (only some of which are meant to actually affect the characters); a lot of video game visuals are also here, i.e. Gideon has a life bar during his boss battle, etc.
• Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare had a segment of the film (in a dream) filmed in 3D. When the audience is supposed to don their 3D glasses, the character entering the dream actually puts on a pair herself; it is explained that while the glasses mean nothing in the real world, in the dream they "can be whatever you want them to be", and allow her to navigate Freddy's mind. The glasses vanish once she puts them on, and reappear at the end of the film, when the 3D is over.
• Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over follows a similar principle as the Freddy's Dead example above. The parts of the movie that take place in the real world are in 2D, while the bulk of the movie set inside the titular VR game and the final battle in the real world are in 3D, with virtual reality goggles being put on or removed (and onscreen text reading "GLASSES ON" or "GLASSES OFF") being the audience's cue to do the same with their 3D glasses. The VR goggles are the means of entering the game and seeing Toymaker's robot army attacking the real world in the final battle. Floop explains this rule in the introduction of the 3D version.
  Floop: For now, take off your glasses. You won't need them for about... ooh, 15 minutes or so. At that point, the movie becomes 3D! Don't worry, you'll know when to put your glasses on. When one of the main characters puts his on, you do the same.
• The film Brainstorm has the memory playback sequences show in a 2.2:1 ratio instead of the conventional 1.7:1 ratio of the rest of the movie. This was not entirely intentional as MGM backed out of making the whole film in a new 60fps, 2.2:1 format called Showscan. So the director filmed just memory blackback sequences in 2.2:1.
• The famous score of Inception was based on taking the Edith Piaf song "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" (AKA the song the characters use to prepare themselves to wake up), and slowing it down to various speeds. Remember that the deeper into the dreams you go, the slower the outside world passes, so to the characters themselves, the song would sound distorted and slowed down.
• The majority of Woody Allen's Zelig was filmed using cameras that date back to the period the film is set in. Simulated damage made the footage look old.
• Thor: Ragnarok: During the stage version of Loki's supposed death in Thor: The Dark World, the backup choir starts to sing the theme music from that scene.
• American Animals:
  • When Warren watches the black and white film The Killing, a shot of him reacting to the film is in black and white, showing how absorbed he's become in the story.
  • When Spencer and Warren's recollections of events diverge, both versions are presented, but the lines between them blur, so that their characters will say things that are only applicable to the other version just before the film cuts back.
  • The real members of the heist, who are dramatized throughout the film by actors and provide talking-head commentary about the story, occasionally show up in the dramatization to observe or interact with events.
• The Man Who Killed Don Quixote: Midway through his Spanish-language conversation with Raul, Toby brushes aside the subtitles, saying that they don't need them because they understand each other perfectly. The subtitles make a tinkling sound as they fall away.
• In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, done literally with the title card in Sir Lancelot's segment as an animated cartoonist is painting the title card itself.
• During the video introducing Howard Clifford in Pokémon Detective Pikachu, some segments contain footage of him on the news in the 1990s; with the video quality and aspect ratio of the footage matching the relative definition of that time. Howard's hair also is more clearly a case of '90s Hair than his appearance in the present day.
• Dancer in the Dark is, for the most part, filmed with blurry handhelds to convey how main character Selma is losing her sight via Soap Opera Disease. It also contains a few musical numbers filmed with 100 little cameras hidden in various places, all filming the same take in a unique case of The Oner; this conveys how the songs are all in her head.
• Reality (2023): As if reminding the audience that we're watching a transcript, the film will occasionally show a tape rewinding, or the transcript being typed. The characters and audio also glitch out when the script reaches parts of the transcript that were redacted.

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