Thursday, October 18, 2007

Real or miniature?

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

Harrowdown Hill music video on YouTube

SmallGantics article at Bent Image lab

This is truly mind-blowing!! There's a longstanding axiom which states that shallow DOF (Depth Of Field, which refers to the area in a photograph that's in clear focus) is a dead giveaway that something is a miniature. Photographers (including StopMoTographers) have always struggled to create an illusion of reality by trying to get as much DOF as possible.... generally by flooding a set with plenty of light and stopping down the iris in the camera or in the lens. Well Prammaven clued me in to this awesome project from Bent Image Lab to do just the opposite.... to make full-sized Real-Atures look like tabletop miniatures! Click the 2nd link under the picture above to read about it (though they don't reveal exactly how it was done.... sounds awfully complicated).

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the shout-out, Strider! I love sharing this stuff.

Shelley Noble said...

It's super easy either via renting a tilt shift lens or using this cool Photoshop faux-real-ature technique!

This was the post that started all the hub bub in 05. There's even a huge Flickr group now.

http://recedinghairline.co.uk/tutorials/fakemodel/

Try it!

Darkmatters said...

Ah yes.... easy for still pictures.... but not for moving video! Bent Image said even the shift/tilt lenses didn't end up looking right. So they had to invernt all kinds of expensive proprietary software and doohickies and suchlike.

Shelley Noble said...

Sorry, but Bullshit. Proprietary my ass. Batch process.

Darkmatters said...

Ah, Ace Reporter Shelley comes through with the big scoop!!! So, Bent Image is lying? They probably just smeared some vaseline on the lens and then made up all that stuff so they could flesh out the article!

Anonymous said...

Hey Strider,

I found a possible solution for your mirror problem. It's in the comments for the Thursday, October 11 post.

Shelley Noble said...

Sorry. PMS.

FleaCircusDirector said...

These examples demonstrate very well how we percieve macro photography and depth of field. In the recent Ratatouille film from Pixar, the shots from a Rat's perspective use a small DoF where as the long shots of Paris typically have a wider DoF. Its strange that we perceive things to be more real based on these kind of faked lens effects but it's definately something I'll be examining in my current animation project.