Making a ship look bigger than life ?

Randall_Oelerich

Randall_Oelerich

Veteran
The HMS Bounty is in my city this weekend, I just went down and took some pictures of it and six other pirate boats that sailed into my city (Duluth MN) as an armada this weekend. The HMS Bounty is the boat used in Mutiny on the Bounty (Marlon Brando) and two of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Well I took pics of it from maybe fifty yards away this quiet Sunday morning before all the hoopla begins, I don't care to stand in line for hours just to walk on board it for a few minutes). Very cool though to see it sail into our said via Lake Superior, in full sail, very cool.

To get to the point, it looks about 1/2 to 1/3 as big as it does in the movie, at least during the action scene when it is moving along on the water. And yes this is the ship used in the movie, the ship Depp and Knightley and Bloom walked on. So WHY does the ship look so much bigger in the movie than when sitting on the water in front of me (movie screen size aside)?

What camera techniques are used to make it appear bigger than it is?
randall
 
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Wide-angles maybe? :)

Since these are big budget movies I wouldn't be surprise if they did some sort of "set" extension on some shots, it's pretty common and most of it is not even perceived as CGI.

But I'd hold my ground on just careful composition. Start scenes with low-angle wide shots, mediums and CUs won't give much of the space characteristics, introduce some shots of sailors up in the sails, there you go, it looks big.
 
Artists, photographers, and cinematographers have long since manipulated peoples inate experiential points of reference. This is why a remembered place you only experienced as a child seems so much smaller when you return to visit it years later as an adult. Everything you experienced and recorded into your long term memory was experienced and thus referenced from you physically being much smaller than your current adult size.

Once you know the mechanisms we use to reference size and distance you can manipulate them. A house in a scene looks real until someone walks up next to it and picks it up to move it and you suddenly realize it was just a small model.

Photograph the Bounty in the middle of open water from the point of view of a rowboat and it will look significantly larger because there's nothing to reference it against except your current point of view.
 
speaking of split field diopters, i know that they allow close focus and far focus for two objects.

not meaning to hijack the thread, but i have kind of a related question: how do you make scale models look bigger? say you're not shooting wide open, but when focusing on something that small... how do you keep it all in focus (esp. at an angle) to make it look like a really large object?
 
Fahad said:
speaking of split field diopters, i know that they allow close focus and far focus for two objects.

not meaning to hijack the thread, but i have kind of a related question: how do you make scale models look bigger? say you're not shooting wide open, but when focusing on something that small... how do you keep it all in focus (esp. at an angle) to make it look like a really large object?
Click to expand...

To prevent DoF issues from revealing forced perspective... stop the lens down very far to increase DoF. Use the biggest model you can, so it doesn't have to be SO close to the camera, which should help deepen the DoF further, and perhaps use a lens on the wider side. It will create a larger disparity between size relationships of foreground and background objects. Telephoto lenses compresses the space, and makes things further away, seem larger. That is the opposite of what you want.

If this is not enough (deep stop, camera to foreground distance increased from larger models, and a wider lens) a split field diopter can carry you the rest of the way, if you can cleverly hide the seam.


closeencountersgobidesertshipwreck.jpg
Cotopaxi.jpg

Scale model very close to camera. People walking very very far away, behind it. The ship looks big compared to the small people. Done and done. Just remember this ship isn't the size of a football. It's most likely very large, say 10- 20 feet in length. I'd be very surprised if it was smaller. None the less, it looks 10x larger from the camera trick.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForcedPerspective
 
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thanks for the explanation, Ryan.

somewhat what i'd assumed... but the actual size. it has to be a fairly large model, then.
 
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