For example, a 'street" scene showing buildings and cars. In some indefinable way you can immediately tell you’re looking at scale models, no matter how well detailed they are. Does it have something to do with the focal length or objective size of the lens, so it’s obvious you’re seeing a small near object and not a large distant one?
With model ships, I think the apparent viscosity of the water betrays the scale. I’d WAG that with other models it’s a variation of the same thing. The dirt on the ground, the building materials, the pavement all look wrong.
One thing I’ve seen done in model railroad magazines that greatly enhances the perception of the model is to photograph it outdoors in natural sunlight.
I’ve seen a couple of “good looking” scale models…
A few shots of the Titanic in the movie of the same name were actually scale models, not CGI. I didn’t notice until I saw it on a “Behind the Scenes” special.
And a submarine in the Bond movie The World is Not Enough looked really good, and it was shown with a lot of water, believe it or not. (I think they just got lucky)
Speaking of The World is Not Enough, there are a couple of long shots of 007’s car the were done with RC models, that I didn’t notice anything “off” about until watching the “Behind the Scenes” special.
There’s an old axiom about movie special effects; “If you’ve done a really good job, the audience doesn’t know there are any special effects.”
Since this question is about filmmaking, I’ll move this thread to Cafe Society.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
The only ones that scream “fake!” to me are the ones that involve water in such a way that these gigantic drops of water fly around. Examples of this are in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Air Force One, just off the top of my head.
On second thought, the one in Air Force One may have been CGI, so perhaps my memory is failing me. But I seem to recall a pretty “fakey” splash.
Yes, but you’d actually use the same focal lenght lens to get the same appearance. For a given film format focal length determines angle of view. In order for a scale object to appear the same as a full size one the same focal length would be use but the model would be proportionally closer so perspective would be similar.
Unfortunately that raised magnification ratio, the ratio of the apparent size of the object on film compared to real size. With all other factors being the same this dramatically reduced DOF (depth of field). A thin zone is in sharp focus and anything farther or closer rapdily goes out of focus. You can get around this somewhat buy using extremely small apertures but that means you’ll need much more light and extreme tiny apertures can cause other optical problems.
I haven’t noticed too many people complaining about the LOTR miniature sets.
And 30+ years on, 2001 still looks pretty good.
I was just going to mention the LOTR miniatures. Or “bigatures” as they called them. Pretty impressive, when you consider that the Orthanc you see in the movie is actually a model ten feet tall, with Isengard about the size of a rugby field :eek:
Because when they do, you don’t realize you are looking at a scale model?
Your frame of reference has a lot to do with it. Does it make sense to say the models in 2001 didn’t look like the real spaceship Discovery or real space pods? How about those orcs or Gollum? They didn’t look like the real things at all.
The effects in both those movies were astonishing but it’s much harder to fool people with minatures of things we are intimately familiar with.
Where’d you see a real Gollum and Orc??:eek:
sequential thread titles.
What’s so great about the LOTR movies is that the scale models look real.
The fact is that you only notice the ones that you notice. It’s like saying that women always notice guys leering at them. They may notice it quite a bit, but it doesn’t mean that they’re not missing some.
For some things, I’m of the opinion that models look better. For example, science fiction… if I ever do a sci-fi flick, I’m making sure they actually build models of my big, giant, badass starships, not just CG. Why? I think they look better (and, when my sci-fi movies are famous as “classics”, I can donate one of the old models to the Smithsonian… :D)
** I just want to second that 2001’s visuals kick ass. They are better than most films cgi.**
I used to work for a model making company. We made architectural models, so those are the ones I reference.
There were two things I noticed right off:
a) A model has no movement. None. In real life, as you walk down the street, subtle movements take place: leaves in the trees, curtains in windows, dogs behind fences, etc. There is something about the stillness that makes it look unreal. Also, in our particular models, the landscape was too sterile, too clean, to be real. Granted, this is what our customers wanted.
b) Specifically with models of something you can reference, the scale in never 100% right nor is it 100% consistent. Say in a building we would make. We could never get the ration of mortor to brick correctly. We could never get trees to have perfect leaves, etc. Well, we could, but there is no way a client would pay for THAT much work.
If it’s something that people can’t reference, such as a futuristic computer, the models tend to be more believable.
I wish film companies would use models more. IMO, the original Star Wars movies were more believable than the CGI ones.
[mp]
Camelot!
Camelot!
Camelot!
It’s only a model.
[/mp]
I disagree. I think what you really mean is you like them more when they’re models, because really there can be no doubt that CG ships look much more realistic.
You may be surprised how infrequently vehicles and locations are CGI in new SF/Fantasy/Stunt movies. It’s a commonly held belief that they almost all are these days, but in fact that’s rarely true.
However, what is happening is that all the camera movement is computer controlled, the images are digitally corrected and super sharp, and the compositing is carefully perfected frame by frame, whereas back in the early days these things were shaky, dirty, and cobbled together with masking tape and cardboard, which gave them a unique visceral reality that seems to appeal to many people.
Not me, though. I love computer assisted movie imagery. Say goodbye to those double-exposed, muddy coloured, blurry wobbly shaky-cam images. Give me razor sharp hyper-reality every time.
Reminds me of how they used to do films that involved “giants”. Which is kind of likeusing models in reverse.
They’d use tiny apetured cameras with the “giant” actor standing near the camera and everyone else far off. With the large depth of field it created the 2D optical illusion that they were all standing together.
[Father Ted]"Big… Far away… "[/Father Ted]
The downside was that they had to positively blind the entire cast with light in order for the camera to receive enough light through the tiny aperture.
I hear this a lot but I can’t figure out why. 2001 looked pretty good considering when it was made. It looks down right crummy compared to what they can do now.
Marc