Back in the 1980’s they didn’t have all of the CGI technology that is used and abused today, so often they had to be a little bit more creative with how they created their various effects. Many classic movies used old magician’s tricks in order to create illusions that were completely convincing on screen.
This leads one to wonder how they did the effects in movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark. In that film Indiana Jones, one of the best known movie heroes of all time, comes face to face with a room filled with a mind numbing number of snakes. You can watch the scene bellow.
So, allow me to pose the following question.
Question: What kind of "magicians trick" did they use to make it look like there were thousands of snakes on that film set?
Answer: There was no trick. They went and got two-thousand snakes and put them on that film set.
If a reasonable person was shooting this scene they would have used mirrors, fake snakes or CGI. But instead they just grabbed a couple thousand snakes and spread them out over the floor, as seen in the below picture. They had to talk to many snake breeders in order to get the desired numbers.
The snakes, as one might imagine, were mostly of the harmless variety. None of them were “Asps,” nor were they “very dangerous.” The worst that happened on set, as far as I can tell, were python bites, which are non-lethal.
Unfortunately though, There was a problem that arose when they actually tried to shoot (with a camera, not a gun) the snakes. It turned out that the aforementioned two-thousand snakes weren’t enough to fill the entire set. Director Steven Spielberg complained that he couldn’t do any wide-shots or long-shots simply because the room he was shooting in was not actually filled with snakes. It would require more then four times the number of snakes originally used to fill the room for real. So I must pose another question.
Question: how did they make that room look like it was filled with snakes when it wasn't?
Answer: They went and got an additional seven-thousand snakes and threw them around with the rest. This created a grand total of nine-thousand living, breathing and biting snakes all in one place. In the below pictures you can see them pulling glass snakes out of giant trashcans by the handful and laying them on to the "Raiders" set. Gruesome stuff.
Also as it turns out snakes like fire. In the script Indy is supposed to use his torches to keep the snakes from getting near him and Merriam, But in reality Snakes are cold blooded and often attracted to fire. the heat that emanates from it keeps snakes warm and comfy. The handlers had one heck of a job keeping all of the snakes away from the fire that snakes are supposedly afraid of.
Finally; Remember when I mentioned that the snakes used were “mostly of the harmless variety?” the keyword here is “Mostly.” They did need an actual straight-up venomous cobra for the sequence seen in the picture right under this paragraph.
So how did they keep poor Harison Ford safe? They accomplished this effect by setting up a glass wall between Harrison Ford and said deadly cobra. Even though it seems like Indy and the cobra are right up next to each other when you watch the scene; in reality Ford was quite safe and happy. The cobra, on the other hand, was reportedly not happy at all, so It spat deadly poison over the glass.
There was surprisingly little danger of harm when handling the nine-thousand snakes that were seen in most parts of the movie, but cobras can kill.
So today's Behind the effects is less about trickery then it is about not bothering to use trickery due to stupidity or urgency. I still think this a fun story. There's almost always something cool to learn when you look "Behind the Effects."
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I know this is old, but it was still an awesome read. Thanks.
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