Miniatures – often easier to build, manipulate and film than the real thing – can be anything from model cars and aircraft to entire cities and landscapes. The model battleships used so effectively in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) were 40ft (12m) long.
Moving miniatures are usually filmed with high-speed cameras, so that when the film is played back at normal speed, the movement looks more realistic. The movement of model ships in tanks of water, for example, is difficult to capture realistically. The same applies to ships’ wakes and ocean wave patterns. Slowing down the projected film helps to make models look more cumbersome, ponderous and realistic.
‘hanging miniatures’ are models suspended close to the camera to create the illusion that they are full-sized and being photographed from a distance. In the James Bond film The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), the villain’s jet-powered, flying car was, in long shots, a model bout 5ft (1.5m) long, with a wingspan of around 10ft (3m).
Many of the ‘outdoor’ scenes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), such as an Indiana landscape over which superimposed UFOs appeared, were meticulously constructed miniatures, with houses less than 1in (25mm) high.
Picture Credit : Google