The secrets behind the scale and miniature effects in ‘I’m A Virgo’. A new excerpt from issue #15 of befores & afters magazine.
In Boots Riley’s I’m A Virgo, the central character Cootie is a 13-foot-tall man. That immediately presented several challenges to production visual effects supervisor Todd Sheridan Perry in order to sell the correct scale of the main character when he interacts with others.
This led to a number of in-camera effects techniques being adopted, such as miniatures, forced perspective shooting and the use of large and small scale puppets. Perry, who was regularly aided in production by associate visual effects supervisor and scale ambassador Scott Kirvan and data wrangler Andrew Spalding, breaks the miniatures work down for befores & afters.
b&a: Can you describe just where models and miniatures were utilized in I’m A Virgo?
Todd Sheridan Perry: The very clear-cut instances of miniatures, in the way people envision something as a ‘miniature’, were Lalo’s House, which is across the street from where Cootie lives and sits on a set of stilts, and Jay Whiddle’s, aka the Hero’s, skyscraper in the middle of San Francisco–both interior and exterior.
But, technically, we had a few sets that were built at half scale. The interior of Cootie’s family house was built as a set in both full scale and half scale. The same is true for his apartment that his aunt and uncle built for him. It’s both a full size set, and a half scale set. The exterior of Cootie’s apartment was a half scale set. And then there were partial half scale sets built to shoot Cootie’s side of a scene–close-ups of him talking to his aunt and uncle in the kitchen. For shots of Cootie making a presentation of his idea to take out the power regulators, the footage on Cootie is on a partial set built. The scene where Cootie and Flora have sex in Bing Bang Burger utilizes a miniature set to match the full size location. And in the final episode where the cult traps him in a cage, a partial half scale set, along with the cage, was shot, plus the facade of the building before and after the cult scene was half scale.
Felix’s convertible was not only built in half scale for shots of Cootie riding around, but for shots where we see both Cootie and others in the car at the same time, a partial build of the back end was built that would be used in a forced perspective way and matched, in-camera, to the real car.
Outside Cootie’s house, a miniature porch was built to match the real Oakland house, and then was placed in situ in front of the real house, in forced perspective. In most of our locations (Bing Bang Burgers, Liquor Store, Community Center), we had a portable 8×8 miniature ceiling with miniature fluorescent lights that could be mounted to C-stands and propped up over Jharrel.
Also, in the liquor store, Cootie is walking behind shelves of snacks. That whole rack, including all the snacks, was miniature, matching in perspective to the other shelves in the store. And then there are the multitude of miniature plates, tacos, beer kegs, shovels, comic books, clothing, shoes, TVs, furniture, set dressing, etc. and all of the principal characters had a half scale version of themselves. So, it was a lot of miniatures.
b&a: How were miniatures used for the San Francisco skyscraper, including for interior and exteriors?
Todd Sheridan Perry: The exterior of the Whiddle Building is a 1/100 scale miniature built at 32TEN Studios based on designs from production designer Max Orgell. To save money, only two sides of the building were built, with the knowledge that the camera would only be able to see two sides. With Google Earth and Microsoft Flight Simulator, I virtually scouted areas in San Francisco to find a place that would make sense for us to put a brand new building that would also keep us from having to remove buildings that were already there.
We ultimately decided that the building would sit on top of what is now Portsmouth Square in downtown. Then, I again used Google Earth to determine where we would shoot our plates from: Could we gain access to the rooftops of surrounding buildings and shoot down? Or would we have to fly a drone, and with FAA restrictions, what angles could we get?
Once these were decided and the locations coordinator checked with the buildings and city officials, we did a real scout to these locations. One was from the roof of the Fairmont Hotel, and the other was from the sidewalk across the street from the Columbus Tower where Coppola’s American Zoetrope is located. We calculated our position and camera inclination for the shots, and then converted to 1/100th scale to be able to match the plates when it came time to shoot the miniature. We had the dimensions of the miniature that was being built, so I made a CG version and dropped it into the plates to ensure the math was right.
The miniature was shot in the parking lot at 32TEN Studios in San Rafael, CA so that we could replicate the natural lighting that we got in the plates. Working with miniature DP Carl Miller, we placed the miniature and rotated it to match sun direction, and then matched cameras. We had a switcher so we could mix the live camera with the plates that were already shot. The two plate positions were greater than 90 degrees apart from one another, so we cheated the fact that we were on the same side of the building and just rotated the roof of the building, which has this conning tower-like projection. That became our indicator as to which side of the building we were looking at. Then the movement of the building rising and lowering into the ground was accomplished by moving the camera up and down on a motion control rig. The model was too big to move, so you move the camera.
b&a: How were the floors of the building set up for shooting and lighting for ‘moving’ shots? What things did you have to consider there in terms of ensuring correct scale?
Todd Sheridan Perry: The interior of the Whiddle building we see when the Hero is moving up and down in the building on a specialized little platform involved a few steps. We had shot the plates of the Hero on greenscreen during principal photography with practical lighting gags. We used the camera data to previs the shots to decide on speed and also how close we needed to be to the miniature. I believe the floors were 1/12 scale miniatures. 32TEN built five different floors that would represent different companies or departments within the Whiddle Corporation.
The structure of each floor was built as a template so that it could be swapped out and each one would match the position of the others. A greenscreen was outside the windows so we could put San Francisco outside. Each floor was shot on a motion control rig, very slowly, with a large shutter angle. We knew we were going to be doing some massive time ramps, so we wanted to get as much data as possible.
Each floor had a daytime and nighttime lighting scheme. For the nighttime, we shot an additional pass with all the ambient lights off, and just source lights on, so we could comp those in and adjust the intensity later. Each pass would start above the miniature and drop straight down, stopping once we cleared the model.
Carl and his team set up a little LED above and below which would turn on when the motion control was about to start and then off when the move was done. This gave us a visual cue to match up and offset all the passes to one other. All these were put together by FuseFX in Nuke and made into a loop, and then all retimed to make it look like the Hero’s platform was speeding up or slowing down. Also in the comp we would do various color corrections on the different floors so get more apparent variations between the five models. We used that color scheme to re-grade the Hero to better match which floor he was passing by.
The background outside was drone footage that we shot in San Francisco. We did get shots of the drone moving up and down, but ultimately went with the static shots because the story point is that we–the camera and the Hero–are not moving up and down: the building is actually moving around us. So the background wouldn’t have any movement or parallax.
b&a: For the house on stilts, how did you approach working out the right scale for the miniature, and then how it would be composited into shots?
Todd Sheridan Perry: Lalo’s house on stilts was a 1/12th scale miniature. 32TEN determined the best scale for the miniature based on a number of factors including cost of materials and what kinds of miniature pieces could be found at that scale instead of building things from scratch. Similar to how we calculated the camera for the Whiddle Building, we shot the plates at the various angles we needed, took the camera data and then scaled it to give us the camera position for our miniature shoot.
This was also shot in the 32TEN parking lot, matching the sun angle to the plate. We didn’t have any camera moves on the house, but we did have a working little elevator that rises up into the underside of the house. Crafty Apes comp’d the miniature Lalo House into the shots. An additional night shot was added later where Cootie walks in front of the house after he has taken out the power regulator. We matched our angle from the miniature shoot to get the element of Cootie in a pick up shoot. And then Craft Apes did a day-for-night grade and additional matte painting work to make the elements shot in sunlight to look like moonlight in the middle of the night.
Read the full article in issue #15 of befores & afters magazine.
Todd Sheridan Perry is also presenting on the show at FMX in the ‘Then & Now’ track.
