Filming miniatures in 3D

[Andrew Rieger]

I know that miniatures are on the way out but I loved the miniature work in Lord of the Rings. I recently saw Avatar (stunning btw) and was wondering if there were any significant pitfalls in filming miniatures in 3D. What kind of lenses are used for miniature work? Some have mentioned wide angles, macros and special infinity focus lenses called borescopes. Some of these miniatures-specific lenses do not look like they would work well with 3D beam-splitter rigs. If I recall correctly, shooting miniatures is all about getting a super deep depth of field and shallow focus is a dead giveaway of a miniature. Anyone know if 3D can be done well with miniatures, on an Avatar-quality level?

 

[Cail Young]

If the miniature is not changing, you can use a mocon rig and shoot both eyes seperately.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

You need a lot of depth of field with miniatures whether in 3D or 2D because you are simulating the depth of field of an object that is supposed to be much larger and farther away from the lens.

In 3D, you also need to scale down your interocular so that the spacing would be similar to a pair of human eyes on a human being miniaturized to the same level. "Coraline" did it in 3D by placing their stop-motion camera on a tiny slider so they could slide the camera over a few millimeters to get the second eye view. With real motion and two cameras, you'd need to have a very tiny interocular, probably requiring a beam-splitter type rig since you'd never get the two lenses & cameras physically close-enough.

 

[Markus Stone]

You want to watch it if you try to comp life-sized objects into miniatures in 3D because you have to replicate the same angle between the cameras for shooting the elements as well as the miniatures, only scaled to match. It's a bit of Pythagoras and Trig, but it can be done.

Cheers,

Markus

 

[Julian Gerretsen]

Hi Andrew

Slightly off topic, but what makes you say that miniatures are on the way out?

If anything, I would say they are growing in use as audiences prefer to see something real and organic, instead of CGI all the time. I think they have earned their rightful place as a cinema mainstay!

Best wishes,

Julian

 

[Craig Parkes]

Coraline was all miniatures, using stop motion. Miniatures are almost always shot with stop motion style cameras (Motion Control).

Coraline has some of the best use of 3D to date. I'd say the climactic scene of Coraline has more effective use of 3D than even anything in Avatar.

As such, really I don't think there are any issues at all shooting miniatures in 3D, you just have to have the gear and be methodical.

The only difficulty I could see would be matching both eyes accurately for composites and scale differences if the miniature is your entire background plate. This is one area where CG would have an advantage (they can setup the scale of the CG scene to match exactly mathematically, and set up convergence and interocular to match the cameras used in live action exactly, as well as the FOV of the cameras. Doing this with a mo-co rig is going to be trickier because of the practical limitation of the camera shooting the mo-co, and the quality of your mo-co rig.