This is cool. I had an assignment in this class in film school, for a class called Digital Culture (or something). It was actually one of these academic classes we had to take just to prove that somehow we were getting real live masters degrees, but we did a lot of hands on stuff, too. One of our assignments was to use this home design software to recreate an interior space from a film. You can also set up a little virtual tour and try to match a scene shot for shot. I did the chase scene from Evil Dead 2, when the Evil Dead chase the dude around the house and into the walls, and the thing you find out from doing an exercise like that is that the interior space is actually physically impossible--it's just for the shot. The maze chase would have been a good exercise, too.
I have a special interest in "impossible cinematic spaces." Octo will tell you about the grief that accompanies every Star Wars fan's realization that the inside of the Millennium Falcon can't possibly fit into the exterior. (Different teams doing the design and construction etc.) Different directors have different sensibilities about this stuff. Kubrick is probably the most sensitive to three-dimensional reality (followed by Ridley Scott.) Hitchcock famously only cared about the flat image and had the actors do things (crouching etc.) that he knew looked ridiculous from every vantage point except the flat image through the viewfinder.
I never appreciated how difficult it would be to find your way out of a maze like this until I tried a corn maze a few years ago. Within seconds I was hopelessly lost. When I first entered I was given a schematic of the maze in case I had any problems, sheeeeesh, yeah, it wasn’t the least bit helpful. It’s like that line from the Simpsons when Radioactive man says, “The goggles, they do nothing!” Fortunately there were several lookout towers along the way that you could scale if you needed some help.
My main point is that disorientation occurs very quickly in these “mazes”. The maze from The Shining always intrigued me. Prior to my corn maze experience I would yell at the screen, “How could you get lost, dummy!?” I know better now.
I like Stephen King’s novella, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon because King does an excellent job describing how easy one becomes lost in a forest. I think it’s one of his better stories in recent years.
I'm not even sure I'd want to negotiate the maze in these pictures. The orientation fuggery seems nightmarish.
I'm reminded of the Rubik's Cube. Before they were everywhere, I saw one in the Sharper Image catalog and thought "that looks easy... I bet it isn't though, I bet it's really hard." I think hedge mazes are the same kind of trap. You walk in for a fun time and a few hours later you're a skeleton.
The way Nicholson plays the "I'll just sit down for a moment and take a rest" move (before the slam cut to frozen Nicholson in that same position in daylight) is great. Scary.
Octo, by "orientation fuggery," do you mean, the fact that the "real" portion of the composite zoom shot is visibly at a shallower angle than the surrounding maze? Or do you mean something else?
I was referring to something much more general, that in a hedge maze (especially such a high one) everything would start looking exactly the same pretty much instantly, and if you lost your North/South orientation (which is quickly possible as you run around confused), you'd be that much more screwed.
I love the whole frozen Jack thing. A great combo: a horrible fate to contemplate so that you actually can feel sorry for him, plus the pleasure at seeing the bad guy get his.
My cousin once told me his class saw three oral book reports on The Shining one day, and two of the kids spoke of the frozen ending while the other one had actually read the book. Oops.
Interesting that Danny and Wendy make it all the way to the center and back out. I always kind of suspected that Danny was leading them, but Wendy (despite seeming like such a moron) has a resourceful bent. By the time they're in the center, it's late afternoon, judging by the (meticulously faked) angle of the sun and the shadows being cast by the (fake) hedge walls.
Why is there a grand staircase in the Overlook's Colorado Lounge? So Jack can tumble down it backwards when Wendy hits him with the baseball bat. Why does he need to tumble downstairs? Because he's got to have that gimpy foot for the entire third act of the movie...or you'll just never believe the maze sequence, because a grown man can move much faster than that, unless he's seriously sprained his ankle. Nicholson clutching his cardigan sweater shut with the hand not holding the axe as he bellows and howls "Daneeee!" in the maze is one of the most amazing things in all of Kubrick.
April 20, 2010 12:32 AM
[Image] Above, a shot from the Vivian Kubrick documentary about the making of The Shining that's on the movie disc, showing the production team's working map of the "real" maze set -- the one Jack chases Danny around inside of. (Note that this is yet another construction, indoors, and is not connected to the "maze exterior" location from the beginning of the movie.) This was an indoor set ("Stage 1" at Shepperton studios in Borehamwood, England); they also built an open-air "maze interior" set for the steadicam shots in the earlier sequence of Wendy and Danny touring the maze.
Obviously they only built a small portion (but included the area meant to be the maze's "center"). The arrows presumably describe the various high-speed steadicam shots in the movie's climactic chase.
For those keeping track and counting mazes, there was the "maze exterior" set (below), the daytime, open-air "maze interior" set, the enclosed, smoke-filled nighttime "maze interior set" (diagram above); the miniature (below), and then the map and the model on the table inside the hotel.
UPDATE: A little Photoshop never hurt anyone. I tried to get a better view of the map from the above image; results below:
UPDATE II: I've updated my mazes page to remove all the wrong stuff I said before I understood the maze's basic orientation, and to add these new pictures:
"Mazes 2"
9 Comments -
This is cool. I had an assignment in this class in film school, for a class called Digital Culture (or something). It was actually one of these academic classes we had to take just to prove that somehow we were getting real live masters degrees, but we did a lot of hands on stuff, too. One of our assignments was to use this home design software to recreate an interior space from a film. You can also set up a little virtual tour and try to match a scene shot for shot. I did the chase scene from Evil Dead 2, when the Evil Dead chase the dude around the house and into the walls, and the thing you find out from doing an exercise like that is that the interior space is actually physically impossible--it's just for the shot. The maze chase would have been a good exercise, too.
April 17, 2010 8:23 AM
That's really interesting.
I have a special interest in "impossible cinematic spaces." Octo will tell you about the grief that accompanies every Star Wars fan's realization that the inside of the Millennium Falcon can't possibly fit into the exterior. (Different teams doing the design and construction etc.) Different directors have different sensibilities about this stuff. Kubrick is probably the most sensitive to three-dimensional reality (followed by Ridley Scott.) Hitchcock famously only cared about the flat image and had the actors do things (crouching etc.) that he knew looked ridiculous from every vantage point except the flat image through the viewfinder.
April 17, 2010 10:13 AM
Wow, thanks for telling me about the Millenium Falcon. I am now grieving. Shit, it's way worse than finding out there's no Santa.
April 17, 2010 10:23 PM
I never appreciated how difficult it would be to find your way out of a maze like this until I tried a corn maze a few years ago. Within seconds I was hopelessly lost. When I first entered I was given a schematic of the maze in case I had any problems, sheeeeesh, yeah, it wasn’t the least bit helpful. It’s like that line from the Simpsons when Radioactive man says, “The goggles, they do nothing!” Fortunately there were several lookout towers along the way that you could scale if you needed some help.
My main point is that disorientation occurs very quickly in these “mazes”. The maze from The Shining always intrigued me. Prior to my corn maze experience I would yell at the screen, “How could you get lost, dummy!?” I know better now.
I like Stephen King’s novella, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon because King does an excellent job describing how easy one becomes lost in a forest. I think it’s one of his better stories in recent years.
April 19, 2010 9:46 AM
JPX, that is a GREAT BOOK! One of my favorite Stephen King stories ever.
April 19, 2010 11:40 AM
I'm not even sure I'd want to negotiate the maze in these pictures. The orientation fuggery seems nightmarish.
I'm reminded of the Rubik's Cube. Before they were everywhere, I saw one in the Sharper Image catalog and thought "that looks easy... I bet it isn't though, I bet it's really hard." I think hedge mazes are the same kind of trap. You walk in for a fun time and a few hours later you're a skeleton.
April 19, 2010 1:30 PM
The way Nicholson plays the "I'll just sit down for a moment and take a rest" move (before the slam cut to frozen Nicholson in that same position in daylight) is great. Scary.
Octo, by "orientation fuggery," do you mean, the fact that the "real" portion of the composite zoom shot is visibly at a shallower angle than the surrounding maze? Or do you mean something else?
April 19, 2010 1:39 PM
I was referring to something much more general, that in a hedge maze (especially such a high one) everything would start looking exactly the same pretty much instantly, and if you lost your North/South orientation (which is quickly possible as you run around confused), you'd be that much more screwed.
I love the whole frozen Jack thing. A great combo: a horrible fate to contemplate so that you actually can feel sorry for him, plus the pleasure at seeing the bad guy get his.
My cousin once told me his class saw three oral book reports on The Shining one day, and two of the kids spoke of the frozen ending while the other one had actually read the book. Oops.
April 19, 2010 2:23 PM
Interesting that Danny and Wendy make it all the way to the center and back out. I always kind of suspected that Danny was leading them, but Wendy (despite seeming like such a moron) has a resourceful bent. By the time they're in the center, it's late afternoon, judging by the (meticulously faked) angle of the sun and the shadows being cast by the (fake) hedge walls.
Why is there a grand staircase in the Overlook's Colorado Lounge? So Jack can tumble down it backwards when Wendy hits him with the baseball bat. Why does he need to tumble downstairs? Because he's got to have that gimpy foot for the entire third act of the movie...or you'll just never believe the maze sequence, because a grown man can move much faster than that, unless he's seriously sprained his ankle. Nicholson clutching his cardigan sweater shut with the hand not holding the axe as he bellows and howls "Daneeee!" in the maze is one of the most amazing things in all of Kubrick.
April 20, 2010 12:32 AM