If you're into visual illusions and you've never heard of Zach King, you're in for a treat. Zach is a master of creating extravagant illusions using a combination of physical sets and digital manipulation. Often set at real (and iconic) places, like Big Ben, and sometimes at sets he builds himself, the result is part staged optical illusion part video editing wizardry. It's a creative combination that's delighted fans for years – and there is zero generative AI used.
His illusions range from jumping through pictures to immerse in the world inside the frame (very Mary Poppins) to stealing famous landmarks and hundreds more visual tricks including more traditional optical illusions and clever editing tricks. See a selection of them in the below video from Reddit, and even more across his social media.
Zac King's visual illusions from r/opticalillusions
Zak's Instagram page (which has 29 million followers, just FYI, and his YouTube has 43 million) includes not only more amazing illusions, but the behind the scenes processes – how he stages them and edits them to create the final effect. His Instagram videos regularly get millions of views, showing just how skilled he is.
Zach's YouTube is even more packed – with playlists, longer short film-style videos and more dating back to 2020. This 'magic video' compilation has so many brilliant tricks.
Reddit and Zach's social media pages are full of amazed comments, ranging from pure joy – "when brilliance enters my feed, it’s almost always you! Once again, bravo!" – to more in depth discussion of how he makes the work.
This Reddit thread is packed with questions and explanations of the process, how he doesn't use AI, and how he uses technology to make the illusions work.
For example, someone attempting to explain the London Eye illusion:
"My best guess is that they drop the real wheel in from above just in the last second before he takes it, with some tongs or something. Then everything before that you edit into the background with cg.," one comment says.
"You can see how just in that second before he takes it thats where you have some relatively "clean" space just to the right of him where they could insert it physically from above and its all pretty clean space to edit that.
I would say the whole background they propably just rotoscoped that out completely and replaced it with CG."
For more extraordinary visual art, see this artist who uses sculpture to create optical illusions.
