As time passed, the technique was improved and modified considerably. Soon after its invention, rear projection caught on as one of the most flexible ways to composite images. With the glass between the camera and the doorway, you can create any world you want. To add to a set without actually constructing one, you can just build the doorway, for instance, and paint the rest of the building on glass. The method caught on quickly and is still a standard special effect used in the movies. Where the buildings were crumbling, he hid them by painting on the glass, matching the colors and textures perfectly. To spruce them up, he set up a piece of glass in front of his camera and shot through it. Several of the missions he wanted to include were rather dilapidated. Dawn was shooting a short documentary about California missions. Positioning talent, mirror and camera in such a way as to create the illusion of the proper relative sizes is called “forced perspective.”Īt the turn of the century, Norman O. This method, called the hanging miniature, is similar to a glass shot (discussed below), but it has an advantage: miniatures usually share the same lighting and shadows as the full-size set, so they blend right in. Since the mirror itself is out of focus, the edge between the miniature and the live action is blurred.Īnother method is to suspend a model between the camera and the actors. While the mirror reflects a miniature off to the side, the live action takes place in front of the camera, seen through the scraped area of the mirror. This special effect involves strategically scraping some of the silver off a mirror, then setting the mirror in front of the camera at an angle. One of the oldest compositing tricks is the Shuftan process. When done well, the composited scene is hard to disbelieve. Miniatures can be combined, or composited, with live action in dozens of ways. It made a truly impressive backdrop for the people floating in the life rafts in the foreground. In the scene where the propellers of the ship stuck out of the water, he used a huge, 1/8-scale partial model of the stern and overcranked the camera by a factor of three. He used many miniatures of the ship with the largest full model at 45 feet or 1/20 scale. That’s the route James Cameron took when filming Titanic. Slowing down the action helps, but when the miniature is enlarged to match the live action, the droplets also become enlarged - a dead giveaway.Īn expensive way to fix this problem is to use giant miniatures. Water is perhaps the most difficult medium to miniaturize. Miniature explosions, tidal waves and landslides all use the same slow-motion effect, with differing degrees of success. Videographers can simulate this special effect by recording using a high speed shutter and slowing the motion down using a nonlinear program like Adobe Premiere or the Casablanca, or by playing the tape back on a high quality VCR that allows slow motion replay. To make a miniature look real, producers shoot it at high speed (called overcranking) and play the footage back in slow motion. One headache when using models is their motion, since gravity doesn’t scale proportionately with size.
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