This Shot from "Seven" is Not a Visual Effects Shot

A filmmaker friend reached out to me with a question about one of our shared favorite movies of all time, so I did what I sometimes do - I went totally overboard to find a satisfying answer and then wrote a long-winded article about it.

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Near the end of David Fincher's 1995 masterpiece "Seven", John Doe takes Somerset and Mills to the middle of nowhere to reveal his final surprise. They drive to a desolate area surrounded by high tension power lines and towers. A combination of long lenses and wide lenses were used to alternate between images of long-lens compression of the space (the first image below), and scattered wider lenses to illustrate the desolation of the environment (the second image below).

Then comes this gorgeous shot, which happens to be one of my favorite single shots in the movie. A simple, slow tilt down of the car racing down the road, filmed with a long lens. It's breathtaking because it looks other-worldly, and some of that is due to the visual "compression" that happens to a scene filmed with a telephoto lens: objects that are far apart from each other "compress" in depth to look like they're actually existing very close together in real-world space. Filmmakers make lens choices to give a scene a deliberate, artistic feel. It's one of the many tools in a filmmaker's toolbox.

My go-to reference for the visual characteristics of long lens photography "compression" is a stunning shot from "Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy" (2011). Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema used an extremely long telephoto lens to capture this shot, which has narrative and character reasons for existing.

A shot from "Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy" (2011)

GIF in high-speed from Dramatic Filmmaking With A 2000mm Lens, by Vashi Nedomansky

As Vashi Nedomansky wrote, "This massive telephoto lens compresses the foreground and background so they appear to be very close together. The mile long runway allows the approaching plane to act as the agent of impending doom as a critical secret is revealed in the plot. The 2000mm lens keeps the actors and the plane at relatively the same size and adds incredible tension to the scene." The long lens alters reality, giving the viewer a different and somewhat warped perspective on the world, one that cannot be replicated with our naked eyes.

Another of my favorite long lens shots is the final shot from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (1989), which seems to place Indy, Henry, Sallah and Brody directly inside the setting sun. They gallop away from the camera, and yet they do not shrink in size, giving the shot an other-worldly feel.

"Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"

This in-camera shot from "Lethal Weapon" (1987) illustrates the same effect. Shot with a telephoto lens, the characters are walking toward camera yet never seem to get larger in frame. They seem flattened against the Joshua trees in the background (hence, the term "compression").

"Lethal Weapon"

(It perhaps goes without saying that I studied each of these examples - and many more - when we were constructing this visual effects shot from "The Force Awakens" (2015), which had an equivalent lens of 2000mm, the same as the "Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy" shot.)

A visual effects shot from "The Force Awakens" that had an equivalent 2000mm lens

Compositing by Todd Vaziri

This visual compression of the world is put in more stark terms when one sees the same location shot with different lenses. For example, it seems preposterous to this Facebook user that the location of "Chotchkie's" in "Office Space" could be the same location in the photo below, taken from a smartphone camera (but it is, truly, the same location):

Lenses drastically change the way a location feels, which is why it's such an important storytelling tool. The same place photographed with two different lenses can seem completely different. This happens in real life with our naked eyes, as well. Notice how whenever you go to a baseball stadium in-person you immediately feel "it's smaller in real life than it looks on TV." This is also similar to the phenomenon of meeting movie stars in real life, and immediately remarking that "I thought they'd be much taller."

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Back to our exquisite shot from "Seven". My filmmaker friend told me that he constantly hears from people on the internet that this shot is a visual effects shot, the idea being that director David Fincher wanted to see more towers than were actually at the location in Lancaster, so he used "CGI" to add dozens upon dozens of additional towers to make this shot dazzle. Also the heat ripple distortion doesn't appear in other shots, but he wanted it in this shot, so they used digital effects to add it. Was this a visual effects shot?

As an extreme fan of this movie and its filmmakers, as well as being a visual effects historian of sorts, I was flabbergasted. Never in all of my days had I ever heard of this shot being an optical or digital effects shot. In fact, as far as I know, there are zero visual effects shots in the movie (other than the opticals for titles, dissolves, etc.). To my eye, this always appeared to be an in-camera shot, without any optical or digital augmentations. But I can understand why some would folks would think that Fincher might resort to visual effects for this shot.

Argued Reason #1 - It's a visual effects shot because director David Fincher uses visual effects a lot!

Fincher, a former Industrial Light & Magic camera operator, has extensively used visual effects in nearly all of his feature films, starting with "Alien 3" (1992), then with groundbreaking visual effects work in "Fight Club" (1999), "Zodiac" (2007) and the winner of the Oscar for visual effects "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008). Since that time, Fincher has deeply integrated visual effects into nearly every shot of his subsequent films with intense collaboration between editorial and visual effects. For his films like "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", "Mank" and "The Killer", each of which have hundreds of visual effects shots, there are also countless shots which have been 2-D stabilized, transformed and warped, and reframed to an exacting degree to achieve a very specific aesthetic, further blurring the lines between editorial and visual effects. In short, Fincher uses visual effects as a key department in nearly every aspect of his films.

But "Seven" is the exception. Historically, the film sits at the edge of the optical-to-digital transition - only two years after "Jurassic Park" (1993) pushed digital imagery to new heights, and only the year after ILM produced invisible visual effects for "Forrest Gump" (1994). Augmenting a shot like the "Seven" long lens towers shot would not have been impossible in 1995, but it would have been extremely expensive, and a huge endeavor. As a reminder, the historical-peers for "Seven" are not necessarily movies like "Apollo 13", "Die Hard with a Vengeance" or "Goldeneye" (all of which had significant visual effects work), since all those had production budgets that were orders of magnitude larger than "Seven"'s. In fact, its budgetary contemporaries were movies like "While You Were Sleeping" and "Get Shorty".

And considering the fact that it's not, subjectively, a narratively important establishing shot, it's hard to imagine a scenario in which it was prudent to spend a massive amount of money on a shot like this. In addition, there's zero indication there are ANY visual effects shots of any kind in the film. There are zero visual effects credits in the end credits of "Seven", nor does any documentation exist that discusses any visual effects work.

Further confusion might come from the fact that the film has been tinkered with since its original theatrical release - but only in minor ways. The unique film process that was used for film release prints back in 1995 could not be used for home video. The bleach bypass technique which gave the movie its distinctive constrasty look simply could not be utilized as a source for VHS and DVD, so the look was replicated with traditional grading techniques. And for subsequent Blu-ray/HD/4K releases, the color grading was re-addressed using modern tools. In addition, certain shots and sequences have undergone grain and noise reduction, stabilization, reframes, and other slight tweaks, all of which were accomplished with modern digital tools.

Argued Reason #2 - It's a visual effects shot because the photos of the location look nothing like that shot!

As discussed earlier, lens choices can dramatically change the way a location feels. When I originally tweeted about this question, asking for first-hand evidence that the shot is visual effects, no one was able to send me any confirmation. Instead, most argued that photos of the location look nothing like the final shot, and therefore it's a visual effects shot.

Several folks sent me photos of the location in Lancaster, arguing that the photos of the location don't match the look of the shot from "Seven". Here's a behind-the-scenes photo of the scene being shot, that was featured in the American Cinematographer article on the movie that was also sent to me as "evidence":

"See? Hardly any towers! The real location looks nothing like that shot!" Well, these photos were shot with very different lenses than the movie shot, so this is not proof that the "Seven" shot is synthetic.

Kelly Port, Oscar-nominated visual effects supervisor, hopped onto Google Earth and may have found the exact road and angle of the shot, from the location in Lancaster, California. At first glance, it appears as though there "aren't enough towers!" But all it takes to get a better match to our shot is to zoom into the image a bit - simulating a long lens - and you get something that better matches "Seven":

Ultimately, no one was able to provide first-hand evidence that the shot was augmented by visual effects. The closest was a single blog post (to which I will not link) that presented these sentences: "The actual location where this scene takes place is on West Avenue I and 105th Street West in Lancaster, California. In the actual location of this space, there are only a few power lines scattered throughout the road. David Fincher added many more power lines with CGI." No citation was provided to support the last sentence. This is not evidence of anything.

So, I called in a favor, in order to settle this question once and for all.

I talked to a friend who has direct access to someone who knows a little something about the production of the film "Seven", directed by DAVID FINCHER, if they'd ask this person if that shot is a visual effects shot. And I got an answer: it's an in-camera shot. No visual effects were used to create this shot. The shot was filmed a long lens on a platform. The heat shimmer is all real, captured in-camera.

The internet allows misinformation to thrive, and ultimately is an existential threat to truth. Even though misinformation about how movies are made is relatively innocuous when compared to almost anything else, it's up to folks who know what they're talking about to correct the information. And this blog post represents me taking my own medicine, when I said people should do something when they see misinformation online:

Write a blog post about how it's not true. Tweet how it's not true. Do a Myspace post. Type it out, make some photocopies and post them in your neighborhood. Flood the channel with truth!

 

update, 10/17/24: After I published this piece, I connected with that website and pointed out their incorrect statement. They were gracious and edited the piece, removing the offending sentence.