The act of adding an additional layer of depth of field over an image in order to make a large scale scene look like it was a shot in miniature (sometimes referred to as “Smallgantics”) has been discussed and linked around the interwebs for a few months now. This effect was achieved before the days of the computer using a tilt-shift lens to create multiple areas of focus on the same frame. I was asked by one of the television shows that I work on to recreate this effect on moving aerial plates of the Las Vegas Strip. If you search around you can find plenty of web pages and a few Photoshop tutorials on how to get this effect, but most of them involve a bunch of fakey soft-mattes that would fall apart if applied to moving images. There are no tutorials on how to miniaturize a moving plate. The closest is one site that describes the steps as “many proprietary processes and software to make it work.” Lame! Here is a quick before and after video that steps through the process that I came up with. Nothing fancy but here goes.
Click the frame below to play the movie or open it up in a separate page HERE.
[quicktime]http://vfxhack.com/wp-content/uploads/smallgantics.mov[/quicktime]
- First thing is to get a solid 3D track of the aerial plate
- Then you need to get a decent 3D model of the major geometry in the scene
- Create a fake depth pass using a shader that is white closer to the camera and fades to black as objects recede
- Use the depth pass in conjunction with a defocus filter in the compositing package of your choice (use a defocus not a regular blur or else you won’t get the right effect)
- Add color correction and lens distortion to taste
Have fun making your gorgeous wide shots look like they were shot on a train set!
LINK to my “smallgantics” tags on del.icio.us
Needs a little more Pizazz. Is there a plugin for that?