My name's Jamie Price.

I was the Visual Effect Supervisor on Downsizing,

and I'm going to take you through a bit of the history

of the miniaturization of people in movies.

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One of the first primary uses of visual effects

to shrink people was in the movie,

The Bride of Frankenstein in 1935.

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In order to blend the big people and the small people

together, two pieces of footage had to be shot.

First there was a background plate featuring Dr. Pretorius

in his lab, and then there were additional shots made

of the people that would be shrunk down and placed

into the jars.

Measurements were taken on set, and then those measurements

were scaled up, and then people who were meant to be small

were photographed from a much larger distance, and therefore

they looked smaller in the frame.

And then early on in the 30s, before the advent

of bluescreen technology, there weren't that many options

for compositing images like this together.

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It was created using composites done by

the Williams Process, which was a process where people

were shot against black, and the brightness could be then

used to create an outline of the character; what we call

a map, and then those characters were composited

into the live action background.

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1940, Dr. Cyclops was being done, and that was in color.

And the Williams Process wasn't really suitable for color,

and so a lot of the solutions in Dr. Cyclops were

to use rear projection.

The background projection image was big, the people

in the foreground appeared small, and then in the final shot

you saw the mix of the scales.

Another thing that's really interesting about Dr. Cyclops

is some of the creativity that they used to have

the interaction between the big people and small people.

You see a mechanical oversized hand that an actor

is grasped by, and the camera is lined up with that

oversized hand in the rear projection screen to

create the illusion of the continuous body of Dr. Cyclops.

Dr. Cyclops also introduces the idea of a cat

threatening some small people.

And it's interesting to note in this sequence,

the different in the look of the shots between

when they're photographing the small people on

oversized sets, and when they're photographing the cat

against a real set.

What's at play here is the idea of depth of field.

And depth of field, is the amount of frame that's in focus.

And so if you look at the coverage of this scene, you'll see

that when photographing the cat, the camera is close

and the background is very blurry.

But when photographing the people, the camera

is farther away.

But it results in the two halves of the scene

have a kind of fundamentally different look.

And it may not be something that you notice at first

right away, but there's something subtle that's

giving away that the two sides of the scene

were shot in different ways.

1957, The Incredible Shrinking Man.

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Now the depth of field is more controlled.

But what's interesting about this scene, also involving

a cat, the focus is deeper and it's a better match

to the shots that are showing Grant Williams.

And so, you begin to feel that the scene is becoming

more of a whole.

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1959, Darby O'Gill and the Little People.

What they did was make extensive use of forced perspective.

Forced perspective is creating the illusion of something

being small by placing it far away from the camera,

and photographing it at the same time as something close

so that when the two subjects share the frame at the same

time, one looks much smaller than the other.

This required a lot of light.

The story is that they got every light in Hollywood,

and used them to photograph these scenes.

They placed one actor on a set piece that was scaled up

and artfully blended so that when the camera was lined up

just perfectly, it looked like it was part of

the foreground set.

Another interesting and old technique that was used

was something called the shift and shot.

The shift and shot involves using a mirror, where a portion

of the reflective coating is scratched away, revealing

just clear glass.

When you shoot the mirror, you look through a portion of it

and you look at a reflection in the other portion.

And by placing the object, either through the clear glass,

or in the reflection much farther away, you create

the illusion of two images being blended together.

This was a technique that was used in the 30s,

as early as films like Metropolis.

It wasn't really until the advent of digital technology

that new techniques started to be utilized.

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Hook, in 1991, used some of the similar techniques,

composites, and bluescreen in order to create the

miniature look of Tinkerbell.

Tinkerbell was also combined with photographic elements

for her wings.

And there were actual miniatures and had the proper small

scale that were photographed separately and then

composited with her.

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1995 brought The Indian in the Cupboard.

They really made an effort to honor the optical principles

of photography when photographing something small.

And that means that they really studied the depth of field

and the optical properties of the lenses.

When you look at some of the shots, you see the backgrounds

are quite out of focus, and that's because they're really

going for this look to make the

foreground character look small.

Another technique that was used is motion control.

Motion control is a system where a robotic camera

is moved that matches its own movement the same way

every single time.

And that way multiple elements can be shot and combined,

and they won't appear to be moving against each other,

because the camera has made the exact same move every time,

thanks to the electronics and the robotics and the gears.

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Lord of the Rings, 2003.

The culmination of all of the techniques that we've

been talking about.

Forced perspective, compositing, digital technology

were all being utilized to create the mix of scales

in this movie.

One interesting advance in Lord of the Rings

was the use of motion control to actually create

forced perspective with a moving camera.

In the early days, if the camera was not in exactly

the right place, the gag would be given away, and the shot

wouldn't work anymore.

This was accomplished by placing one actor at a certain

distance from the camera, another actor at a farther

distance from the camera, and then as the camera moved

the actor in the distance will also move so that they

appeared to be constantly the same distance.

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Ant-Man, 2015.

In order to achieve the realism level in Ant-Man,

special sets were built and photographed with a

still camera, and a library was created of images

for each of these small scale sets.

That allowed the film makers to the recreate those sets

digitally, and compose whatever shot they wanted,

from whatever angle they wanted, and with whatever

depth of field that they wanted.

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That brings us to Downsizing, 2017.

Alexander Payne didn't move the camera very much,

and he didn't cut very often, which meant that the shots

were subject to a very, very high level of scrutiny.

All of our measurements had to be extremely precise,

or the audience would tell, over the course of the shot,

if the perspective wasn't quite right, or the lighting

wasn't quite right.

So we really were incredibly meticulous with our notes,

with duplicating our environments.

One of the techniques that we decided not to use

was the idea of oversized props and sets.

We felt in looking back at the earlier work, as good

as it was, there was always something about the

detail level that gave it away.

However, one of the things that we knew we needed

was the actual interaction for the actor and the lighting

interaction of being in a set.

We used one of the oldest techniques in motions pictures,

and that's rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping is where the outline of a character

is traced, frame by frame, so that that character

can then be taken out of whatever background they're in,

and placed into another one.

We actually did build oversized sets, but we knew we were

never going to use those sets in the final image.

They were just there for the actor to have something

to work with, and for the cinematographer to be

able to light.

One of the things that changes when you're photographing

something big or small is the relationship of the size

of the subject to the size of the light.

So as the subject gets smaller, the light, relative

to them, gets bigger.

And that meant we had to have very large light sources.

Then the actor was rotoscoped out, and then composited

in to the background.

And that's what appears in the final movie.

I think what's most exciting about the trajectory

that visual effects technology has taken; it's how much

freedom film makers have now.

There are a lot fewer limitations being placed

on film makers because of technology and because

of visual effects, and that allows their imagination

to really take flight.

Wow. That is wild, isn't it?

That's just wild.