Robert Zemeckis has demolished his reputation with the back half of his career, and his follow-up to Forrest Gump is the film that has suffered most. What was the blank check film made great by Zemeckis’ command of technical craft now shows all the signs of the soulless lover of gizmos he would turn into. What keeps it high on his filmography is the performance by Jodie Foster. Contact is where I learned about one of the great cinematic tricks for combining location footage with a set.
During the sequence where Foster’s Ellie hears a signal from deep space, she’s racing back from the giant radio dishes to the Control Room where her team is also listening. She is on location; they are on Set. The camera follows behind her as she runs through a location door and magically enters the Set. This is achieved through an invisible edit, and by bringing to the location any Set Dressing visible through the door.
A similar trick is used for the Underground Casino in the movie Black Panther. To get there, our characters pass through a Security Checkpoint. That room was built on Location and then taken down and moved to also be part of the Casino Set. The transition is seamless.
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