I’ve read many times how Buster Keaton’s famous house stunt required precise calculations. Obviously, this is a crazy stunt, but what calculations do you have to make to do that? If the house is gimmicked to fall apart, couldn’t he just have first laid the wall on the ground, mark the spot where the window was, then pull the wall up?
In: Mathematics
Congratulations! You answered your own question. Measuring things counts as calculations when you start adding and subtracting to figure out precisely where to stand to not get crushed by a stunt.
The answer here is “Yes, but”.
If you laid the wall down and marked out the window, you run the risk of smooshing your actor.
See, if you’re a tall guy like I am, standing in Keaton’s spot would mean the wall would crash into my head and probably kill me outright. So we have to calculate exact angles and distances using trigonometry in order to make sure the path of the window cut-out aligns with the height of the actor. (Although, I guess we could just put a life-sized dummy on the spot and move it around until it works)
We also need to make sure the window cut-out is large enough for the actor to pass through at any given moment, without making it so large that it appears unusual to the audience. This is probably the most tricky part., but it can still be solved with High School level Geometry and Trigonometry.
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