Georges Méliès – L’homme à la tête en caoutchouc AKA The Man with the Rubber Head (1901)

A chemist carries out a bizarre experiment with his own head.

Quote:
Méliès appears in the film as both the apothecary and his duplicate head. To create the illusion of the expanding head, Méliès first filmed the surrounding action on the laboratory set. Then he surrounded his head with a black background and used a specially built ramp to move himself, sitting in a pulley-controlled chair, gradually closer to the stationary camera. Using distance calculations made in advance, an assistant refocused the camera lens in real time as the head moved, so that Méliès’s face would remain in focus throughout. Méliès chose to move himself toward the camera, rather than the other way around (as in the technique later named the tracking shot), to ensure that his head would appear to be sitting on the tabletop and would stay aligned with it throughout the growing process.

Méliès’s camera recorded the expanding head directly onto the same piece of film negative on which the laboratory action was shot, creating a multiple exposure in which the head was superimposed on the blank area of the set. The movement of the chair back and forth on the ramp was carefully timed to match the pre-recorded action. The other special effects used in the film are substitution splices and pyrotechnics.

Georges Melies - 1901 - [Star Film 382-383] The Man With the Rubber Head.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 min 29 s
Size: 	44.1 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	700x576 ~> 768x576
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 287 kb/s
BPP: 	0.227
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/353647A91D891D4/Georges_Melies_-_1901_-__Star_Film_382-383__The_Man_With_the_Rubber_Head.mkv

Language(s):None
Subtitles:None