One thing I love in movies is miniatures.
Like, did you know the Poltergeist house was only 42 inches (107 cm) wide?
And the DeLorean from “Back to the Future” is a miniature.
So were the kids in “E.T.”
Okay. Okay. I know what you're thinking.
Those are all old movies.
Of course they use miniatures, ya old grandpa.
And you're not wrong.
All these films were before that period where CGI took over.
I changed to prop making because miniatures, nobody wanted them anymore.
But with Wes Anderson and now with some other filmmakers
it's strange because they want these...
Yeah, a bit old-fashioned techniques again.
I’m Simon Weisse.
I am a model maker and prop maker.
Simon has made props for The Matrix Resurrections, Bridge of Spies...
and he's made miniature models for Wes Anderson films like
Asteroid City, The French Dispatch, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Most of the time, if miniatures are done right
the audience isn't supposed to know that they're tiny.
But if you keep an eye out
you can see it used in a few commonplace.
For expansive sets that establish the world of a film
like The Grand Budapest Hotel...
or the castle from Harry Potter...
or the opening gates of Jurassic World...
and fantasy vehicles that would be too expensive
or too impossible to build at human scale.
Like the spaceships from E.T. or Asteroid City
or the Razor Crest from The Mandalorian.
And if you're trying to blow up an entire building for real
a miniature helps make that possible.
Like this building from Inception
or the White House from Independence Day.
Though, one thing you might have noticed
is that some of these miniatures aren't actually that mini.
Grand Budapest Hotel is a good example.
In these times, when we talk about miniatures
they are not so small.
I mean, in the 50s and the 60s
you could have a very small house and the audience was impressed.
But today we build those miniatures as big as possible.
We ended up making this in 18th scale, which is quite big.
That hotel was, in the end, 4 meters (13 feet) wide.
I don't know how much this in feet.
It was a good scale to have a good definition of paint and everything.
Most of the time we wouldn't
use the same material as you would on a real building
because if you use lots of bricks
the structure, it will not be up to scale.
If there’s wood, we will use wood
but the very special African woods with a very fine structure.
In the end, the thing which really changes everything
is the paint and the patina.
If they take a big brush, you will see the brush on the model.
No, they have to take the finest brush
and find those dirty pieces near the windows and everything.
Getting that detail and grunge right
is especially important to making things feel lived in.
It's one of the reasons that Star Wars has such a busy, dirty look.
The more details you have, the more realistically
it can pass as a larger object when filmed with a camera.
Choosing the appropriate scale to work with, however
is sometimes a matter of efficiency.
We can work at this 12th and 18th scale.
I like a lot 35th scale.
That's also because in 18th scale and in 35th scale...
you can find a lot of stuff, ready made cars
good looking trees and other stuff.
It takes time off our work, which is very long
very time taking.
Moviemakers can play tricks with scale, too
mixing big and small miniatures within the same shots.
And The French Dispatch, we had landscapes and, you know
they were not only in one scale.
We talk about a forced perspective.
You had one scale in the foreground.
Then you get a certain deepness to go smaller and smaller and smaller.
So maybe in the foreground you are in 24th scale
then in the middle you’re in 15th scale...
and in the end you are in the 100th scale.
And if there's a mountain behind
it’s in the 1000th scale.
Once they get the scale and all the details right
filmmakers still have to make this thing look like
it's the correct size in camera.
The first issue is how much of the frame is in focus.
This is determined by three things:
How long your lens is.
How close you are to an object.
And how much light you're letting into the camera.
The longer your lenses, the more compressed an image looks
and the more parts of the image are out of focus.
Wider lenses are better for shooting models
but to make them look big, you have to get really close.
And when you get really close
the plane of focus becomes extremely shallow...
meaning only a small bit of your frame is in focus
and everything else is blurry.
If you were filming the same shot of a real car
you'd have to be much further away to capture that same angle.
And that would make much more of the frame in focus.
Films like “Game Night” play with that knowledge
using strategically blurry photography
to make this real suburb
look like a tiny little boardgame.
With miniatures, you want the opposite effect.
Every part of the model should be in focus so that it looks big.
To do this without changing your distance to the model...
you need to decrease how much light you're letting into the camera...
which makes everything darker.
But filming in bright sunlight can counteract that issue
and make the lighting feel more realistic overall.
For other stuff, most of the time we are shooting this outside.
The train and the other stuff.
Even The Grand Budapest Hotel was shot outside.
The composition of your model shots
matter just as much as the technical details.
The most striking example of this for me
is the opening shot of the original Star Wars.
By having these two planets in the frame...
we have an immediate reference point
that tells us we're working on a planetary scale.
As this first ship enters the frame
we get a sense that this could be
about the size of a ship that carries humans.
So when this other ship enters...
it feels gigantic, menacing, and powerful.
Both models are miniatures
but how they chose to compose the image
made them feel larger than life.
Star Wars in 1977 had no choice
but to use miniatures to make their futuristic world look real.
Star Wars projects today
rely heavily on CGI
like so many other movies.
But both tools have their strengths.
Talking about explosions and water and everything
I try to avoid miniatures...
because if you have a miniature with water...
you have to build it at such a big scale
at 3rd scale or 4th scale.
Otherwise, it doesn't look good.
This is because natural elements like water or fire don't scale.
So while water droplets on a full size vehicle look tiny
those same droplets on a miniature would be huge...
giving away that scale doesn't match up.
Sometimes I'm asked, “Oh, could you do a miniature?”
And then we will have water running through.
And I say, “No....”
maybe we can do a miniature.
But the water, please add it digitally.
It will look much better than real water.
Explosions can be challenging for similar reasons.
This model from “Inception” is truly gigantic at four stories (12.19 meters) high...
and that scale is needed for the explosions to feel more realistic.
Even if we do those miniature sets...
It's all in combination with with CGI and other new techniques.
Films like Blade Runner 2049 and Asteroid City
use the miniature sets in conjunction with real actors
through the use of greenscreen.
And The Grand Budapest Hotel showed that real humans and puppetry
could be combined to make this delightfully stylized skiing sequence.
The decision to use miniatures varies between directors.
For Wes Anderson, he believes that people are going to recognize
artificiality, whether it's CG or otherwise.
His tastes lean towards miniatures...
because he likes the old-fashioned techniques.
Nolan, on the other hand, has used miniatures
because he wants every scene to feel like real footage
with all the organic messiness and artifacting
that comes with filming a real thing and having it baked into the shot.
20 years ago I thought
miniatures are done, it's finished.
It's all going to be done in CGI...
but now even in commercials they are using miniatures.
But it's just— I think it's...
for me, it’s an artistic choice.
The spaceship, which looks very different from other spaceships.
We had so much fun doing this.
It's a big model.
Nearly 3 meters (9.8 feet) wide.
And the spaceship is a mix of handmade stuff inside
and all the sides were laser cut.
In the end, it was about three months...
because we have all these ongoing process.
We’ll start with something...
and sometimes we have only two people on this...
and at the end there are six people on this.
So yeah, more or less three months.
For this kind of complicated model.
Yeah, it's about that.