Three of the main characters were the same actor, and yet there are shots with all of them in the same scene. When I saw this as a young adult I didn’t even notice that Mike Myers was playing three roles and was genuinely dumbfounded years later when I found out.
How did they do those scenes so seamlessly?
Wow, dumbass kid I was I never realized he played both roles. I guess he did a great job acting.
Edit: also still trying to figure out who the third character the was, lol
Edit 2: oh, it’s Fat Bastard isn’t it.
You forget he also played Goldmember in the third movie.
How did he gain and lose all that weight so fast to play both??
Lots of corned beef in order to both gain weight and acclimate to the role of being a Scottish Fat Bastard.
A few different film techniques.
they could film the actor in different costumes on the same set without moving the camera, and then they put those performances together.
so you can have the profile of Austin powers on the left talking to the profile of Dr. evil on the right, and those were separate performances pasted together so it looks like they’re responding to each other even though Mike Myers was performing those conversations separately during different recordings.
If evil and Austin are in the same shot and it’s an over-the-shoulder, the actor facing the camera is the real actor and the guy not facing the camera is a body double with the same hair or bald mask
so if you were looking at Austin and Dr. evil in the same shot, either those are two separate performances put together and you’ll see that they never touch each other, or if they do touch each other, you’ll notice that you never see the frontal face of one of the actors, which is actually a body double.
and you can see these two techniques and others used in Eddie Murphy’s movies, or pretty much any body double move movie.
Corridor crew should do a vfx artists react video for this movie!
Compositing has been a thing for, like, forever, going from cutting and gluing film together to, well, having lookalike instead of the real actor in certain shots…
I’m mostly weirded by how you found out only now. I guess go and have fun looking up “Captain Disillusion” youtube channel.
I love Captain D, the way he takes apart a scene in Blender is an art form in itself.
I guess the question I’m asking is, normally when editing comes into play you can sort of notice it through one way or another. There’s an uncannyness to it that makes it jarring, whereas in Austin Powers I never once clocked on that I was watching the same person. Did they use really sophisticated techniques for this? Was the campiness and comedic tone of the film itself a good distraction from any editing goofs?
If it was a more sombre film, would I notice it more I wonder?
Edit: @Aurenkin mentions the ping-pong scene in the 2019 Moon film, which has a more mature tone and the editing there was definitely flawless.
Here’s a Captain Disillusion VFXcool episode about this special effect, specifically as applied to Back to the Future (which innovated having a split screen with a moving camera): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhNDsPMaK_A
Corridor Crew is also an excellent YouTube channel for industry professionals commenting on how effects are done
My guess: For the first version of the scene they’ll have someone saying the other character’s lines the way they should be played so that dialogue looks natural. Once one version has been filmed it’s not hard to play that version’s audio while filming the second version so the actor is actually hearing himself play the other character.
Was the campiness and comedic tone of the film itself a good distraction from any editing goofs?
That really helps by distracting the viewer away from the small give aways.
They also did a really good job with the interactions and editing so it flows smoothly.
I personally have never noticed flaws when such tecniques are employed, but it may be just immersion doing its job. I’ve never heard of Austin Power being singled out for its special effects…
