It’s pretty choppy on my computer, which is unfortunate because the actual ‘choppiness’ plays a part. In any case, it appears to be live-action footage; only it’s shown in such a way as to appear to be stop-motion animation of miniatures. In this and another commercial some of the vehicles look like toys.
Obviously the top and bottom of the frame were blurred, simulating shallow focus. I suspect that they grabbed every other frame in post to make it look like it was animated. They shot it on the one day ( ) that there’s full sun, with the light being somewhat high, giving it a ‘tabletop’ appearance. Is that all there is to it? Or did they use techniques I haven’t thought of?
I was going to say that’s just tilt-shift, but reading your post and looking at it more closely, I think you’re right that it’s just post-process blurring to simulate tilt-shift.
the top-and-bottom blur can be accomplished with tilt-shift photography, or it can be done in post-processing.
The stop-motion animation effect looks like it was done with time-lapse photography, i.e. shooting the film at maybe 15 or 10 frames per second and playing it back at 30 frames per second. This makes objects appear to move faster than they would in real life (as if they were miniature), and also provides the jerkiness that we have come to associate with stop-motion animation.
Keith Loutit has a bunch of movies on Vimeo utilizing these effects. Here’s a really good one. One of the cool things about the time-lapse action is that you can see the bobbing of large boats (see at 2:25); this normally happens on a very long time scale so that it’s difficult to observe, but with the action sped up, it becomes obvious.
The thing with the movement is that the objects/people appear to be moving at a more-or-less normal speed. If you reduce the frame rate and play it back at normal speed, then they would appear to zip around. But I think that if you film at normal speed, grab ever other frame, and repeat each frame, then you would get a sort of stop-motion effect like the one in the video. In a motion picture camera (which I’m more familiar with than video) you would retain the shutter speed and exposure for 24 fps, but you’re effectively getting 12 fps in post before you double each frame.
It is just a timelapse. Look at the speed of the people walking. You’d have to play it back at whatever frame rate the camera recorded the scene, perhaps 5 or 10 FPS?
Frischluft’s Lenscare is a really popular post-DoF plugin for compositing applications like After Effects. I’ve been using it for years, myself.
Don’t underestimate the effect of the camera angle too; the most effective scenes in that commercial are all shot from an angle visibly higher than ground level, as if you’re looking down on a model. The colors have all been saturated a bit more than normal as well.
Essentially, you need to trick the brain into mistaking blurring along the top and bottom of the image as blurring due to being too far and too close from the focal plane of your eyes. So you need the blurred areas to line up with areas that should be distinctly near and far. Getting a high angle really helps. In another videoI didn’t get enough height over my target and it doesn’t quite work well.
Since your depth of field when focusing increases with distance, to have a narrow depth of field convinces your brain that you must be looking at something that’s close for the focal planes to be so small and clearly seperated - but since your brain knows the size of things like cars and trees, that must mean that those objects must be small, if they look like that while being close - hence the look of small models. It’s a cool trick that works basically off fooling how our brain’s image processing works.
This seems fairly important to my (non-photographer but former occasional model-builder) eye. Saturating the color not only makes the colors look a little more artificial, it will wash out some of the fine shading and detail in the middle of objects, while preserving a sharp outline, which makes things look more like a model.
Based on the videos I’ve seen, the effect seems to work best when there’s no horizon visible. Without the horizon you can imagine the scene playing out on a tiny set. It’s not universal–water scenes seem to work ok, since water is somewhat nondescript and you can’t really tell how far out it extends. But to my eye, roads ruin the illusion since you can see them extend out to “infinity” via perspective. Shallow angles are ok if the horizon is blocked by hills/trees/etc.
) that there’s full sun, with the light being somewhat high, giving it a ‘tabletop’ appearance. Is that all there is to it? Or did they use techniques I haven’t thought of?