MATTHEW'S TIPS FOR BELIEVABLE MINIATURE EFFECTS
-Build miniatures at as large a scale as you can afford.
-Limit the length of time audiences see miniature effects in the finished edit.
-Light them realistically, usually with natural light.
-Mix
the miniature effects with other techniques like CG and live-action to
confuse the scale and keep the audience guessing. If a person
walks through a miniature scene, it's harder for the audience to
realize it's just a miniature effect - and with modern compositing,
this sort of scale confusion isn't so hard to pull off!
-Record
at high speed, using the square root rule (slow a shot down by half and
it seems 4 times as large, slow it to one third speed and it looks 9
times larger, etc. This is with regard to physics of falling or
breaking pieces of a model; small things that fall off small models hit
the ground faster than big ones off big objects, so you need to slow
the motion of the miniatures down to compensate.)
-Make the
model highly detailed and realistic-looking. (My burning
dollhouse in Troop 4 TV failed at this, it looked fake so burning it at
60 fps from a believable low angle was insufficient to sell it as real)
-Structure
it like the real thing so if it breaks apart it does so in the right
way. (My Duel 2030 exploding bunker at 1/8 scale, for example, looked
good but could've been even better if the walls were prescored and a
lot of little bricks broke off realistically when it blew up.)
A
bonus tip for water, one of the hardest things to scale down well - mix
detergent into the water to make the droplets in the water break into
slightly (20-30%) smaller ones during a splash. BUT ALSO add an
anti-foaming agent to minimize the bubbles that result from the
detergent.
Bonus #2: Cloud tanks can make awesomely weird billowing-smoke effects. |
