The Schufftan Process

The Schufftan mirror trick process is the second major special effects technique used in the film. It was invented and implemented by Eugen Schufftan in collaboration with Ernst Kunstmann, and was a form of compositing miniatures into the full-scale shot using mirrors.

Schufftan was not originally involved in filmmaking, and had a background as a painter and architect, but he found himself fascinated by the medium of moving pictures. One of things he found disappointing was the lack of a sense of depth in most of the films of his time, and so he devised the mirror trick to achieve this sense of deep perspective by compositing models and real scenery.

The Schufftan process enabled a range of complex shots never before possible in film. In the scene where the mob is chasing the evil Maria, we see a shot of the crowd running on a roadway between two seemingly enormous buildings. In another shot, we see a group of workers crossing the roadway while overhead the stop-motion animated model cars appear to drive overhead. To achieve these effect, a mirror was mounted at 45 degrees in front of the camera lens. This mirror reflected the image of the miniature model, positioned directly behind the camera. Parts of the mirrored surface were scratched away to correspond to areas where the real-life footage would be composited to give the camera an unrestricted view of the real scenery.


This process was also used to create a sense of vast scales without having to create even larger sets than the production alrady demanded. The lower floors of the buildings in the so-called "worker’s city", for example, were constructed full-scale in one of the film’s massize sets. The upper floors were mirror image models.The same technique can be seen in the track scene in the "Stadium of the Sons", in which the track and lower portion of the wall were shot full-scale with people running in the foreground. The wall itself was over 10 metres tall (or nearly 33 feet). The upper portion of the wall and the dome in the background were a mirror image of the model, scaled to 1/20th of the simulated size.

Scene Breakdown, pt. 2

One of the more remarkable scenes in the film portrays a telephone with a sort of television screen in Joh Freder’s office, far predating any such actual technology- including the television itself! The effect was created by projecting the footage of the workman shown on the screen backwards onto the screen using a projector before filming this with the camera positioned in front of it. The projector and camera were phase connected to ensure they worked at the same speed.


Multiple exposures of the film were the third major technique used in the film. This wasn’t done by copying one exposure on top of the other in post-production, but during the actual shooting in the camera, using the same reel of film rewound several times. This was done by Gunther Rittau and his assistant H. O. Schulze. This technique can be seen in the scene of the multiple eyes and male faces gazing on the dancing evil Maria in the Yoshiwara district.

Realizing the Potential of Visual Effects

Metropolis can be seen as a film that helped filmmakers realize the potential of visual effects in cinema. Although it was not the first film to employ innovative means of visual effects, it was the first major feature length film to rely heavily on these means to create a world that could not be filmed in reality. The Schufftan process, perhaps Metropolis’ greatest visual effects contribution, was employed by many film makers in the following decades, including Hitchcock. Although it has since been largely replaced by matte shots, the method has been used as recently as The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003).


As important as Star Wars was in the 70s to the field of special effects, Metropolis broadened people’s horizons as to what could be achieved in film. Stop-motion animation, advanced compositing effects and the use of models became the standard of analog visual effects for roughly fifty years before the advent of CGI and digital means of compositing. All of these were methods employed in Metropolis, the great-granddaddy of films such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, 300, or any other of the visual effects extravaganzas that we readily consume today.