Welcome behind the scenes as we take you through a journey to take a normal sized person and
make them look huge. Today we're taking a look behind the scenes as we take a normal
size person and give them the illusion of looking huge. Now when you guys are designing
a photo shoot like this there are a couple of things you want to keep in mind. One of
the big things is, how are you actually going to pull off an illusion like this and second
is, what do you want to say through the photograph. We are going to take you behind the process,
talk about the lighting, the posing and building a little bit of the set and how we came about
with actually figuring out how we were going to pull the photo off.
The original concept for the shoot was to create a metaphor for someone having a giant
ego. Someone who enters the room and they're the biggest personality and they want everyone
to look at them. We went about creating a person who is actually going to completely
fill a room with themselves and that is going to be a metaphor for the ego. In kind of figuring
out how to do that, obviously we have, not a giant person. We couldn't find one on
Craig's List, so we had to get a normal size person and figure out how to make them
huge. There were a couple of things to do. First
is, you want to make sure you have your background picked out. To do this we scouted all around
Chicago and found some really nice locations and finally picked one that was going to really
work very well for creating a giant person. You want to make sure that you photograph
or get your background plate in first. With these kinds of composites if you are going
to do a composite, what you want to do is figure out the thing that you can't move
first. In other words, that thing that ... the background I can't really change that a
whole lot, but we can change the subject quite a bit to match the background. We start off
with the background and then figure out okay, let's try to figure out how we're going
to now match the subject to that background and that's where building everything and
the rest of the shoot comes into play. Once we decided this was going to be a composite
image, in other words, we were going to have a photo of a background and a photo of a girl
and we were going to put those together. We needed to figure out how we were going to
do this and what are some of the important things in creating a composite. Now the most
important thing when you're creating a composite is matching the lighting. You want to make
sure the lighting in the photograph of the girl matches the lighting of the photograph
in the room. To get that, you have to make sure you first photograph the room. We went
out and took the pictures of the room and figured out exactly the look and the feel
and even did a little bit of post-processing on the background, so we knew exactly what
the background was going to look like. Now once we did that, we could figure out okay,
now how are we going to replicate that have an actual girl match the lighting of this
giant room. To fully create the illusion that this girl
was in fact in a giant room, we decided to build in minature a smaller version of this
room. Now you don't have to get incredibly detailed when you do build these miniatures,
the reason is, the most important things are your shadows, your highlights and how the
light plays with your subject and the background. You can take the subjects shadows and you
can take their highlights and bring those from the image and cut the rest of the environment
you choose to build out of there and that will help when compositing the two images
together. So how do you actually build a miniature?
Well, it's basically like a box. The thing we built looks a lot like a miniature torture
chamber or like a dog ghetto, it is not fancy at all. It's just structure with a couple
2x4s and some plywood. Now what we did do is make sure to take measurements of the original
location, so we could get everything to scale. We had to measure out the width and height
and the distance from the camera, ceiling height and all those sorts of things. With
those measurements we then went into 3D modeling. Now this isn't a completely necessary step,
but it helps us to visualize. In the 3D model we were able to re-model the
room and then fit a girl in there that was going to be the height of our girl, which
was close to six foot. We rebuilt the model of the room inside of a 3D modeling program.
We put a six foot model in there and then we bent her around to fit the space. That
is how we got the scale for our final room. Without anyone in there and it was just a
test like, I do not know how big we should make this thing. You can make it one to one
scale, one to two scale or one to three scale. You can make any scale you want. Doing everything
in CAD allowed us to figure out the scale that we wanted to make, what was doing to
be a cramped six foot girl in this room and then we took those plans and then built the
physical model from them. We have a lot of calculations going on. We
took the big size room and we put that into CAD and we took the CAD drawings and then
we took that out to build an actual size room. You do not really have to get this sort of
thing perfect, but the most important things are the light sources. We played very special
attention to match the light sources of the small room with the light sources of the large
room. You'll notice that along the top of the image we have these little chandeliers
that are hanging and those are what basically what's lighting the entire scene. We also
have little lamps on the right side of the image, we have lamp that is actually lighting
up part of the image. Now if you're going to put a person in that environment, it would
make sense that those would be the lights that would actually light the person. We went
through great lengths of measuring and figuring out our camera angle and everything before
the actual shoot and then we drilled the holes and put our own lighting into the small box
that we created. We used basically just light bulbs. We used 200 watt light bulbs and nothing
incredibly fancy there is something that, I think we built the entire box with the light
bulbs and everything for less than $100. Not a huge deal in actually building the box,
but having it built meant that we could basically put our model in there, snap a couple of shots
as long as we had our angel and everything match for perspective, which is going to make
our job in post-production quite a bit easier. Often times when you're doing a composite
shot, you have to give your model a lot of direction, because they're not actually
in the scene that they're in. Let's say you're photographing someone in the studio,
you're going to make them look like they're in the middle of the artic. You have to say,
act like you're cold. What would you be doing? In this case we didn't have to do
any of that at all, because we actually built a small room for this person to go in, so
it wasn't like act like you're in a small room, because they actually were in a small
room. We didn't have to say avoid the lights that are supposedly hanging there, because
they were in fact avoiding those lights. Building this room in miniature meant that, it lended
the whole image to be more real as far as what the model was actually going to be posing
and to make sure that she actually did look like she was in a small room, because we didn't
we have to fake that part of it. Often times building a miniature or building
a small set like this will really help add a little bit of legitimacy not only to the
overall composite, but to the pose itself. Everything we've done up until now with
photographing the large room, putting it in CAD, making sure we built a scale model and
putting the model into place matching our camera angles and perspective, all of that
basically sets us up for having a little bit of an easier time when we're working in
post-production. For the majority, what we had to do is cut our subject out from the
background and create some really nice selections and then tweak our lighting a little bit and
then play with the feel of the overall image. Photoshop is hard enough trust me.
What you want to do is make sure you can take all of these little steps before you get into
Photoshop, so when you are in Photoshop you don't have to do the unnecessary things
like trying to create a light source that would be behind her head, because we actually
really did that. That's not the thing you want to focus on in Photoshop. You want to
focus on fine tuning and completing an effect. All these little steps are going to make the
post-production much, much easier for you. Thanks for joining us in this journey on how
to take an ego and inflate to size and fill an entire room. Look for a Photoshop tutorial
coming soon. Thanks so much for watching guys and I'll PHLEARN you later. Bye everyone.