Shooting a miniature to match a full-sized set

G

glass

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So let's say that I want a ginormous turtle running around in two rooms in a movie. Since I've got a barn where I could do it studio-style, let's say I will be building those rooms, full-sized, for the humanoid actors to do their thing. Now, how do I put the turtle in the room, doing particular moves as realistically as possible?

My idea was to build a miniature set complete with white furniture, scaled for the turtle, tape the turtle from the same angles as the full-sized scenes for a few days until it accidentally does all the things I want it to do, (white) key it out and edit it into the room. To keep the wall et al colors consistent, I thought I'd build the walls from plexiglas and light them from outside. I figure I'd also have to blur the turtle a bit to match the resolution of the full-sized shot and do a potentially infinite amount of work to match the lighting on the turtle to the scene. Beyond that, I'm stymied. It seems like every potential solution to this leads to CGI, which I know nothing about and likely can't afford.

Ideas or references to read?
 
If you're really wedded to this sequence, maybe you should consider CG after all. Maybe there's a student who'd do it for you, for his reel. Maybe you could enroll in a class, and see if the instructor will help you do it as a student project of your own.

I've done forced-perspective sets, and foreground miniatures photography, and 3D animation. I'd choose 3D as the tool of choice, unless you've already exhausted every possible way of getting it.
 
Forced perspective can yield some b=nice results, and it is pretty affordable to do. You can check out some of what I've done here:
http://www.dvxuser.com/V3/showthread.php?t=27821

Using FP, you could either film the sequence all at once, of you could do it in two passes, one with the turtle, and one without. That way you wouldn't have to build two sets (One for the people, one for the turtle.). But for that to work well the camera would need to be locked down inorder to get it to match better. The better the detail in the minitures the more believable the shot will be.

If you have the resources 3D would be the way to go as you could control how, when, and where the turtle moves.
 
One thing that you have to realize is that if you are striving for a "realistic" giant turtle, the movements of the animal must also be given perspective and that means shooting the turtle at a higher frame rate (slow motion). How you are going to do that with video, without renting a Varicam, is a question. You could shot the turtle an a green screen with a variable frame rate 16mm camera and then comping it in. I suggest you use a pin-registered camera like the Arri S, M or SR. I am pretty sure that they are all pin registered. Without pin registration, you would be battling gate weave when trying to comp the 16mm footage.

The frame rate for shooting minatures has been formulized, I just do not have that formula handy. I know that it is in Raymond Fieldings book, "Special Effects Cinematography". My copy got borrowed and never returned.
 
Make sure you take exacting measurements (tilt, lens, etc) of the original photography.
Make a mockup or a monster pole so you frame with the turtle in mind. You'll need to actors to react accordingly to it.

Consider a rough set in greenscreen. Unless the turtle is supposed to push against the walls you may not need to deal with the that detail. Don't bother with the furniture unless it's immobile (big couch or something) White room will create a lot of light on the turtle and may not provide as clean of matte as you need. Make sure to match the lighting.

Plan on guiding your turtle or putting food in certain places. Waiting for him to do what you want could be a very long wait.

If you can hold the set with the actors you could consider blocking it in, shooting the turtle and then shooting the live action. That way you could rig chairs or other things to move, including actors, based on turtle actions.

As mentioned you may want to consider shooting high speed (30fps, 60fps video) A turtle is slow but it depends on what type of action you want. As always test all of this before commiting to a large shoot.

As much as everyone thinks a turtle would be easy to do in CG it's not. If you want anything remotely close to matching a real turtle you'd have to take details texture photos of the turtle, build a complete turtle animation skeleton, build blinking, movable eyes, skin in so neck motions and folds move correctly. Now you have to animate him realistically. That means getting a real animator who's studied a lot of footage of real turtles.

Building a static box in CG is easy. Building a real, living breathing creature is very tough.
 
Thanks for all the great points.

I decided against forced perspective because I don't want to be paying for days and days of extra taping, waiting for a turtle to do something. I figured if I had him in a box, I could spend a couple of hours hanging food over his head (for example) to make him look up without having a full crew. Also, the actors have to interact with it enough that the additional complications seemed too great to overcome.

I've never cut a white key, but with the turtle being green, greenscreen is probably out. :)
Seriously though, I thought of doing it blue or some other color, but having already made the walls plexiglas to get an even color, it seemed like it would be easier to lower the brightness over the whole turtle than remove a blue tint. Can it be off-white? What about the white makes it a less clean matte?

I totally did not think of changing the frame rate, which makes sense...but this thing is still in planning stage, so the HVX200 will be out by the time I start.

Thanks very much for the turbosquid link. If I can buy a cheap basic character and have someone put in some extra detail and animation, it might work. I might be able to defeat some of the need for detail by keeping it more in shadow, and will definitely use a stand-in to act to. I have heard that building the character is the hard part, and then making them follow the script is fairly easy. Does anyone have an idea of what sort of timeframe would be required for either step?
 
You know, nobody's mentioned the simplest, most obvious solution...steal a quarter-pound of plutonium from your neighborhood powerplant, feed it to your turtle, let mutation take its merry course and - voila! - huge enormous scary big turtle. All that, and radioactive, too!

Then you hire a huge enormous scary big radioactive turtle-wrangler, and shoot everything at 1:1.
 
LOL...now that's an idea I didn't think of.
Does anybody have the number for the 3-Mile Island Film Commission? Maybe they've got one pre-grown. :laugh:
 
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