cinematography Shooting Miniatures

PaulGriffith

PaulGriffith

We're shooting another action short in a couple of weeks featuring a (very short) car chase and wanted to experiment with flipping a car. We're not exactly insured or funded, so to flip it we're going to experiment with shooting plates and then shooting a model or rc car on chromakey and keying it over.

Any tips? Would a model being pulled with fishing line or an rc car be better? All I know is what I've read. Shooting it fast in a higher frame rate then slowing it down is supposed to help it pass, and of course we'll match lighting to the plate and shooting it with a high f-stop to keep it all in focus and avoid the minature look.

Thanks for the input.
 
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Have you thought about alternatives like POV shooting? Driving in the car. Cut to POV, camera flips over, good sound effects, etc.
 
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I have seen test footage from pro's, and a lot of directors still use miniatures in place of cg. For example, in Dark Knight some of the crashes and bat mobile shots in the tunnel were miniatures. Of course, Nolan did hire the best minature guys to build it and pull it off and spend tens of thousands doing it, still.

We are shooting some backup in case it's not great. I hadn't considered point of view, it might work. Our main plan is to focus on the hero's car in the foreground and the minature of the antagonist's car flipping in the back out of focus, culminating in a giant unrealistic summer blockbuster dynamite in the trunk explosion. I know we can composite the explosion stuff ok, and it and the focus will cover some of the finer details of the crash. If for some reason it looks great, then the tumble will own the shot.

If neither of those work, we're shooting extra safety of the car "crashing" into a hangar it's driving next to, again with the focus and explosion cover we can pull that off with the real car no problem.

Star Wars did minatures and took them to a new level, Dark Knight's are so good most people don't know. I heard inception had a few minatures cut in as well. I like doing practical as much as possible, and I think this could be a good starting point and test for it.

The POV ideas are good though, I'll think through those a little more. Thanks guys.
 
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I think you could totally pull it off. Especially if you can sell gag with a real car (and have an RC miniature version) in an earlier shot (or a couple), and incorporate the POV stuff already mentioned. You'd only' be talking a few seconds of RC car and even then if it is cutty enough it, I bet it would work.

Check out this vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3iG_La-FSg

Obviously only the close up shots are useful, but that first jump about 13 secs in, if I didn't know it was an RC car, AND it was lit perfectly to match the plate shot - well, it's convincing. 1:13 is another good example, depending on how you shot the plates. I'm not sure how to make the RC car look like it has enough weight as it flips around. I think the slo-mo helps sell the "solidity" factor in the sample above, but wouldn't necessarily work to show the whole car flipping over in a wide (for example). You'd have to pick and choose some select angles maybe. There are larger scale RC available too. I don't know the numbers, but bigger would make your life easier. If you had a remote control go-cart and someone skilled enough to build a realistic car body for it, that might be perfect.

The hard part would be match-moving if you were moving the camera around.
 
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From how you've described it in your second post, I'm much more convinced that you could pull it off convincingly. Lots of great advice from David - going as large scale as is practical will make everything much more realistic. The models in The Dark Knight were built to 1:3 scale.

There are some great speed calculation spreadsheets in The DV Rebel's Guide, which might be worth buying for this if you don't already have it - just as much stuff on practical effects as on digital.
 
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PaulGriffith said:
We're shooting another action short in a couple of weeks featuring a (very short) car chase and wanted to experiment with flipping a car. We're not exactly insured or funded, so to flip it we're going to experiment with shooting plates and then shooting a model or rc car on chromakey and keying it over.

Any tips? Would a model being pulled with fishing line or an rc car be better? All I know is what I've read. Shooting it fast in a higher frame rate then slowing it down is supposed to help it pass, and of course we'll match lighting to the plate and shooting it with a high f-stop to keep it all in focus and avoid the minature look.

Thanks for the input.
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just a tip... not sure if this will work well enough... but you could try shooting from a distance but zoomed up... not completely zoomed up... but just enough to eliminate the fore ground end of the depth of field... so that it helps you get rid of the miniature look a little bit more

some one correct me if i am thinking backwards on that... cause i dont have my camera around to test it real quick and make sure thats correct...
 
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