*WARNING. THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS*
“The creator who hates his creation.”
Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is chock full of horror references and tributes, but no film gets more love in it than Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. In order to find the second key, Spielberg sends his main characters directly into the Overlook Hotel to do battle with the film’s baddies, and it’s honestly one of the coolest sequences in film history.
Meredith Borders described the sequence for us recently…
“Parzival, along with his friends Aech (Lena Waithe) and Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), make their way to the virtual Overlook Theatre, with an old-fashioned marquee trumpeting The Shining. As they walk inside, they find the lobby of the Overlook hotel, the rustic southwest design we all know so well. They wander into Jack’s office off of the lobby, and there they find his trusty typewriter, with pages upon pages of “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy,” of course, only this time the words form the shape of keys on the page, in honor of Ready Player One’s key quests.
The kids get separated, because that’s what happens in horror movies. Aech follows a ball that bounces through the lobby and takes him to the second floor, at which point the audience started giggling in nervous anticipation. He walks past a framed photo of Overlook guests of the past, then sees the twins in their blue dresses in front of the red elevator. The elevator does what that elevator does, which is to say it opens and floods the hallway with an ocean of blood that sweeps Aech off his feet and to – you guessed it!- room 237.
He meets the young/old naked woman from the bathtub, before an axe – Jack’s axe, presumably, although we never see the wielder – breaks through the door, and suddenly Aech is running through a tiny model of the icy labyrinth while a giant axe chops after him. The scene culminates with a ghostly ballroom scene that looks like nothing so much as the ball in Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride, before everything dissolves into a zombie fight, because Ready Player One can never be just one thing.”
How did the visual effects artists bring this sequence to life? Were the Ready Player One character avatars digitally inserted into actual footage from The Shining, or were sets built to faithfully recreate the film’s version of the Overlook Hotel? As highlighted by io9 this week, the new book Art of Ready Player One digs into the process.
To make a long story short, the wizards over at Industrial Light & Magic tracked down a “high-quality telecine transfer” of The Shining and scanned it into their computers, using it as the blueprint to digitally recreate the iconic rooms and corridors of the Overlook. The digital sets were then combined with actual footage from The Shining as well as some new shots with practically created props and sets, allowing for Spielberg to seamlessly bring his characters into Kubrick’s movie. Digital film grain was also utilized.
Be sure to read the full piece over on io9, as it’s incredibly fascinating!
