making small objects large scale

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

This is really a CAMERA question, far more than editing.
(Sony, Panasonic, Canon, and JVC camera forums on the COW come to mind.)

You need a micro/macro lens system to shoot small items.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_photography

http://www.imaginghardware.com/Products/Lenses/P40035.aspx

Even though you can find “Macro Adapters” to fit onto the front of standard lenses, they do not usually yield the best quality images.
The PD 150, with its permanently-attached standard lens may not be the best choice for this task.

[Martti Ekstrand]

This is mostly neither a editing/compositing application or camera problem but more a model design/making issue. Generally if you want models to appear photo realistic in ‘close quarter’ settings (ie; humans won’t look out of place in the scene) you cannot go below 1:10 scale but it still makes for lot of careful and time consuming model construction. Not to mention space consuming. HO model railroad scale (1:87) will never look good for anything but distant backgrounds, think Blade Runner cityscapes or LotR size castles. Water/fire/smoke really don’t scale well below 1:4 btw. Once the models are properly built you still have to light them just as well as a live action set or better and you need lots of light as well to make the depth-of-field match what it would look like in full scale.

A good resource for learning about model making for film are the coffee-table books from Industrial Light & Magic and also old issues of Cinefex from 80s / 90s. Also get some making-of books about Aardman movies like Chicken Run or Wallace & Gromit.

Back issues of Cinefex can be found at https://www.cinefex.com, Chicken Run is covered in great detail in issue 82 and The Corpses Bride has a nice little article in #104. The LotR issues are also worth getting as they utilized a lot of ‘bigatures’ in tandem with CGI.

This may seem daunting but remember that Nick Park started the first W&G film ‘A Grand Day Out’ as a uni project and in a later stage Aardman got involved in finishing the film.

cheers

[Afrancis]

thanks, i read somewhere that you can use a positioning technique called hanging foreground which involves putting the model at a certain distance from the nodal point of your lens which would make it appear enlarged. Do you know about this effect?

[Martti Ekstrand]

[Alison Francis] “Do you know about this effect?”

Yup, it’s a in-camera composite trick conceived in a time where not even optical printers was a option. Georges Méliès did it in the 1902 special effects extravaganza ‘A Trip to the Moon’. These days you might as well add it in post-production instead unless you really want to do hard-core old-school VFX. Citizen Kane is one film full of very advanced set-ups using that method.

cheers