Miniature set photography with motion control head.

Thomas Woolley · Nov 22, 2016

With all the plethora of budget motion control sliders and heads out there now, does anyone know of the cheapest way just to shoot a motion on a miniature set and then scale it up and repeat it with an actor, in the current marketplace. Doesnt have to be the ultimate piece of kit or have a huge payload or anything, is there anything that can achieve that for a few grand?

Björn Benckert · Nov 22, 2016

Nope not that I know of. And as you scale your shot from miniature to 1:1 then yes your move becomes bigger and it goes quite quicky. As it´s really difficult to shoot really small miniatures as everyting has to be scaled, even sensor to make it right and a lot of times you need to be of a lens hight that is less than the lens is in radius, and not to mention the camera. So normally you end up with quite large minatures, just to be somewhat able to have precission and pull focus, get a reasonable dof with the same camera etc. Then also your large corresponding move easily gets really big. I dont know how many times I had people comming with story boards and even done their miniaturs and had camera moves that in real world would be like 100 meters high and 100 meters long... and such.... no low cost motion control does such moves, and no high end mocos does it.

Its difficult with the milo, and even with the bigger cyclops but those are as far as I know pretty much the only onces that are built to handle scaled moves and have such functions written into their control program. Sure you can scale your move in 3D and load into other rigs but it gets quite delicate that the rig really knows it´s XYZ´s and that everything is properly callibrated. Just having your nodal point of the lens slightly off will hurt in a grand way.

If you are in LA I would talk to CameraControl and in Europe there are a few milos as well, Alan in Amsterdam is king, as long as our is down for maintainance

Sure you can do some moves scaled with a slider or such but it would get very limited.

Here is a tricky one I did with scaled, flipped and matched moves a while back. Shot it on my mitchell S35 and K-35 lens and good old 400ASA Kodak stock and 3D printed the set in something that must have been one of the very first 3Dprinters... took mad amount of time to get them done. A normal little archtitect model builder could have done it in days. But we spent weeks on end as Autodesk like the ide of computer generated sets

https://vimeo.com/31206627