How Steven Spielberg's 'Ready Player One' Recreated A Classic Stanley Kubrick Movie

One of the most memorable moments in the pop culture smorgasbord that is Ready Player One eerily recreates a scene from one of Stanley Kubrick's most famous films. If you were wondering just how Steven Spielberg so accurately recreated Kubrick, the answer awaits you below.

Spoilers for Ready Player One follow.Ready Player One left me a bit cold, but one particular sequence stood out above the rest. In this sequence, the main characters from the film travel to a part of the virtual world known as the OASIS that recreates scenes from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. In a film loaded with special effects, this sequence is the most-memorable because Spielberg recreates the look and feel of Kubrick's Overlook Hotel perfectly. It was the only moment in the film that made me truly stop and wonder, "How did they do that?" Well, now we know.

Over at io9, Germain Lussier dug into the soon-to-be-released book Art of Ready Player One by Gian McIntyre, which provides a detail explanation of how Spielberg recreated specific scenes from Kubrick's The Shining.

A lot of the landscapes in Ready Player One are designed to look intentionally artificial – the bulk of the film is set in a virtual world, after all. But The Shining sequences look real, which had me wondering if Spielberg had an actual set constructed to recreate the Overlook. Per the Art of Ready Player One book and i09, that's not what happened:

They didn't, although there was talk of actually rebuilding the entire set of Kubrick's film. But since it's the character's CGI avatars who are in the scene, and not the real actors, the effects team eventually decided a digital recreation would work best.

So how did Spielberg and company so accurately recreate the look of Kubrick's film? As io9 explains, "the team at ILM found a "high-quality telecine transfer" of The Shining, scanned it into their computers as a reference, and began to digitally recreate the locations needed for the film. "The bar that I wanted to reach was for anyone to watch it and go, 'That's a shot from The Shining,'" senior visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett told McIntyre. "It just happens to have our characters in it. Of course, if you're inventing new scenes within The Shining or new moments or new characters, then the camerawork has to [change]. We didn't have enough coverage of the different scenes."

Head over to io9 to learn more.

I may not have loved Ready Player One, but I might pick up the Art of Ready Player One book to learn more details like this. You can do the same when the book hits shelves on April 17, 2018.