Tilt-shift, Film-crew

[khiemtran]

There's a film crew shooting outside our office. The perfect time to try out the tilt-shift mode on my camera...




And so, I present ... TinyFilmCrew!



Not sure what that guy happened to be clutching a frisbee the whole time, but I assume it was something technical...



They spent a long time filming around this carpark, and especially around that car at the end.

Of course, they had a lot of equipment.



And an army of tiny extras...



At least, I think they were extras. They might have just been cheap labour, but they seemed to spend the whole day sitting around.

And occasionally getting instructions...



I gather the two sitting on the car are the actual actors.



I kept checking back from time to time, but all that seemed to have changed was the positioning of the cameras as they did one take after another.



While the extras waited... (Note to self, tilt-shift works bettter with a wider zoom.)



They've been at it for a few hours now. And now they're using extra lighting.



Suddenly, the extras are mobilized! (Or are they just being told to start packing away the barriers?)



No, they're walking past the camera, carrying bags! I think, anyway.



Turns out they're shooting a tv series set in our town. I guess we'll have to tune in when it comes to find out what that scene was all about. Assuming it doesn't end up being cut because of the idiot taking pictures from the window...

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Oh, you have a tilt shift option in the camera! Cool! I've been wanting to try this, but I'd have to fake it in PhotoShop.

I think the first two and the first one of the waiting extras are particularly convincing. :)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

It's actually a fake tilt-shift mode (so it's a fake effect that simulates an illusory one). All it really does is blur out the top and bottom on the assumption that you're looking down at a flat plane.

It seems to work better the further you zoom out (or at least when there's a lot of detail all over the frame and each figure isn't too big).

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Yes, real tilt shift cameras cost a lot of money, but it's nice to have it available in-camera rather than having to fiddle in PhotoShop. You have to manually blur the relevant bits to fake a shallow depth of field and then saturate the colours a bit.

I've noticed a few TV dramas recently using the technique in the opening credits, so presumably they've got the fake effect installed too.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

It's nice to have another option for shots of distant subjects too, especially against busy backgrounds. For some of those carpark shots, I would have had to zoom quite a long way (and throw away a lot of image quality) to make the subjects large enough, but the tilt-shift mode actually makes an asset of having your subjects fill a tiny part of the screen.

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

So what does tilt shift do?

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Actual "tilt-shift" is when you have a special lens which can change shape (so it can "tilt" its angle relative to the camera or "shift" its lenses up and down. Then people discovered that you can use it to make photos look like miniatures by using a very narrow depth of field (the region in the photo which isn't blurred). There was a splash of publicity a few years ago when "tilt-shift" photos of "tiny" city and beach scenes started making into the papers and so on.

THEN people discovered that you didn't need a special lens at all, all you needed was to fake the narrow depth of field by blurring the picture in bands (on the assumption that the range of whatever you are looking at would roughly correspond to its height on the frame). So, by 2011, it was just another photoshop effect or (in my case) a mode on my camera.