Somewhere in my subconscious I think that shadow has always registered as "impossible".simonshack 4 Oct 17 2010, 11:51 AM wrote: - The entire Naudet scenery is an advanced 3D "virtual reality" composite and was never actually filmed in that Church st/Lispenard street intersection. It cannot even have been shot in advance on a different morning (with successive CGI insertion of "airplane crash"), since the lighting is physically impossible.
I know this because every time I watched that scene, with that goofy fireman looking down the manhole, I had the "feeling" that the pavement was wet, as if for rain or for a street-washing that had just went on (but, alas, the pavement isn't wet at all): because only wetness would excuse that shadow, in the sense that it would not be a shadow but a reflection, as sometimes happens with thin puddles above dark sidewalks.
Now I can finally correct that effort of my brain, that in that split-second had to make sense of what felt wrong in the image --as I file that detail under "bad lightning during trickery". So thanks for this :D