The shooting star seen in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the 1975 blockbuster shark film, is back in focus after Christopher Nolan’s new movie, Odyssey, showed dolphins in one scene.
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He used side-by-side GIFs to prove his point in a 2018 X post thread.
Meanwhile, Nolan confirmed that the dolphins in Odyssey are very real. “There’s a shot I’m particularly proud of with Odysseus looking out over the boat in a very rough sea with dolphins playing in the waves beside him. A lot of people assume those dolphins are CGI, but they’re not. It’s all for real,” he said, as per British Film Institute (BFI).
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Many noted that this was the advantage of filming in real locations, as sometimes one would get to see surprising things that could never be captured on the green screen. A short clip showing the dolphins go past Odysseus (Matt Damon’s) ship has also been shared online.
The post noted “The dolphins visible in The Odyssey are real and were filmed by accident.” This has led to many comparisons with Jaws, with people online saying that it is the modern day equivalent to Spielberg’s crew capturing the cosmic moment on camera.
Also Read | Where was The Odyssey filmed? Full list of Christopher Nolan’s filming locations
“This is why filming with practical sets and on location matters. You get once in a lifetime touches that no green screen can ever replicate,” an X user said about Nolan’s Odyssey, to which one person replied “Shooting star in JAWS”.
Here is a clip of the shooting star in Jaws.
Despite the comparisons made, there has long been a debate about whether the shooting stars in Jaws were actually real or if they were the work of special effects.
Director Steven Spielberg is reportedly among those who have claimed that the shooting stars in Jaws were captured on camera by chance. However, many continue to disbelieve this claim. The 1995 documentary, The Making of Jaws, affirms the first shooting star is real, but not all have bought into it.
A common argument is that a shooting star would not have appeared as clearly on camera, especially since the nighttime scene was shot during the day. Todd Vaziri, an award winning visual effects artist, tried to debunk this theory and claimed neither shooting star in Jaws was real. As per Vaziri, the the streak of light’s reaction to motion blur effects pointed to CGI being used. Vaziri mentioned the blurred shooting star showed a straight line which was free of impact due to the vessel’s movement or camera and did not show that lens distortion had taken place, hence pointing to an artificial effect.
In Jaws, the shooting stars appeared when the crew were on the boat Orca, and dining below decks, singing Show Me the Way to Go Home. At this time, an unexpected attack from the shark they were hunting threw things into chaos. The first bright streak of light could be seen as Brody loaded his revolver on the boat’s deck, and the second was visble about 10 seconds later. Years on, debate about the authenticity of the shooting stars continue despite the director having made his stance clear.
