Turn Cheap Miniatures Into Awesome Visual Effects

[Music] working with miniatures is hard it's the somewhat frustrating process of moving tiny things around over and over again constantly trying to convince yourself that it looks good until eventually and hopefully it actually kind of does hey how's it going this is todd with no film school and this video is all about thinking of some out of the box ways of dealing with miniatures particularly using compositing and cg work in conjunction with the miniatures and yeah just really finding ways to turn trash and toys into hopefully some decent looking things so this whole thing started with a short film that i've been working on and there's a scene in the movie where a helicopter is flying around outside of a window and it's out of focus but you can still kind of see a search beam kind of going back and forth through the shot i wanted to think of some interesting ways to maybe pull off this shot which led me to some experiments [Music] so i thought since the city can be out of focus it doesn't really have to be an actual real city so we grabbed some random toys and little pieces of junk from the garage and we kind of spray painted them up and sort of laid them out on a table and i used a whole bunch of flashlights and light panels to kind of shoot light through it and create some interesting looking bokeh and shapes in the background and so after a frankly really long time we kind of ended up with a city type shape that went out of focus didn't look too bad and so what i did was i just hazed up the scene and took a flashlight and moved it around in the background to create kind of that helicopter effect it kind of worked pretty okay and then from there i just got a shot of myself sitting at my kitchen table put a green screen on the outside and actually loaded up a reference image into my monitor so that i could kind of line the shot up correctly and you know make sure that the perspective would match and all that kind of stuff and then i just comped it all together and if you'd like to see a much more detailed walkthrough of how i pulled off this shot there's actually a full walk-through breakdown on adobe's channel where i show you how i put it all in premiere and comp it all together so that whole thing really got my brain churning a bit because that was a use of miniatures that i'd never really considered before so one thing i've always really wanted to do was like a dystopian city look with miniatures [Music] [Applause] i found a bunch of these really cheap buildings that you can buy online i think they're like six bucks a pop and you kind of just snap them together these little plastic buildings i think they're for like train sets or you know if you want like cool stuff to put your action figures next to whatever and with the help of my good friend mike who's really into weathering props and like turning nerf guns into like really cool movie guns and things like that he came and helped me with some of the weathering so he gave the building some scale and texture and things like that so at first only two of the buildings came in and so that was kind of a bummer but i thought well why not just shoot the buildings in different positions on a table and rotate them a little bit and they should all kind of work if we just you know key them out and put them one after another so then i was able to take all that stuff into post and turn those two buildings into a shot like this and again if you want a full breakdown video on how i pulled all of that off and compt it all together in premiere head over to adobe's channel there's a full video about it there so eventually the rest of the buildings came in and i thought to myself let's take this one step further so mike came back over and we weathered up and textured those buildings as well put them all together this time we even did some cool stuff taking like a dremel to one of them and just sort of really really gnarling them up and really getting as much texture as possible and then from there i did some photo scans photo scanning has become one of my favorite things to do and i've been photo scanning just about everything to do a good photo scan you just need as many sharp and detailed images of an object as you can get from every possible angle i like to take a video with my phone since the autofocus works really good and i tend to get really good results that way you want to make sure that there's no harsh directional light on your object as that will be baked into your model later on i either shoot on a cloudy day or indoors with a softbox as close as possible and with some extra bounce from some poster board once i have a good sharp shot from every angle on an object i bring that shot into after effects and speed it up a ton so i'm only getting about one frame from every second generally i end up with 250 or so frames and then i just export that as a jpeg sequence then you just take all of your jpegs into a photogrammetry software like meshroom or reality capture meshroom is free and works really well but i tend to get a little bit faster and better results from reality capture which is now owned by epic games and cost about one to two dollars per scan usually then the software will take all those images and create a fully textured and hopefully highly detailed 3d model that you can bring into your software of choice mine's blender and you can use it any way you want to so i thought that was kind of interesting you can sort of create a cg asset out of a real life miniature and paint it yourself and all that instead of doing a bunch of texturing in the computer [Music] so here are some basic tips for when you're working with miniatures you'll want to give yourself as much space as possible at first i was working on a smaller table and things got so much easier when i started using a longer table next you'll want a lens with the closest minimum focus distance possible i use one of those laowa probe lenses but you can also use something like a sigma 18 to 35 or something like that you just want something wide that can focus really close that way you can create some depth and parallax by moving the camera i recommend shooting on a piece of foam board or foam core so you can punch set pieces into it and they'll stay put like i did with these trees it also makes it a lot easier to move everything when you need to next you need some ways to create depth in post a great way to do that is to shoot on a blue screen or a green screen so you can just key things out and add more things further in the background another great trick is using overlay assets like fog or dust in post to add a bit more depth and practical realism to a shot if you want to give that a try there's some links for free 6k resolution fog and dust assets in the description and again for more breakdowns and detailed looks at some of the compositing used here check out the full videos on adobe's channel linked below and most importantly just be patient and stay calm things will look really bad for a really long time before they start to look better and the exact thing you pictured in your head may never actually happen so what was the point of all this i don't really know i just wanted to do some experiments and figure out what sort of weird stuff i could get up to with miniatures and you know especially not taking a ton of time you know i'm not the type of person who can spend a month building up a really amazing looking photo reel city or something like that but i do really like finding interesting ways to use my hands and create an interesting shot i mean you can even just go to a hobby store and buy a piece of foam board and you know a bunch of little fake trees and just poke them in and get your daughter's dinosaur toy and you know create a prehistoric scene all in your bedroom anyways thank you guys so much for watching be sure to check out that series on adobe's channel link below and i will see all of you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: No Film School

Views: 22,438

Keywords: filmmaking, film, movies, miniature vfx, awesome visual effects, photoscanning miniatures, photoscanning, weathering props, dinosaur miniature, premiere pro compositing, miniature city vfx, miniatures, special effects, visual effects, probe lens, laowa probe lens miniatures, practical visual effects, practical miniature effects, no film school, todd blankenship, dystopian city vfx, cinematography, adobe premiere, adobe tutorials, vfx tutorials

Id: VMuf2bHdGrY

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 24 2021