If you want to make something look bigger, you need to have a shallow depth of field.The other thing is the lens. You can use a wide angle lens to make things look bigger.

I love miniatures used in movies! For example, the Poltergeist house was only 42 inches (107 cm) wide and the DeLorean from “Back to the Future” was a miniature. In the old days before CGI, props like miniatures were used a lot. Today, with Wes Anderson and other filmmakers, miniatures are making a comeback. Model maker and prop maker Simon Weisse has made props for The Matrix Resurrections, Bridge of Spies, and miniatures for Wes Anderson films like Asteroid City, The French Dispatch, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

When done right, the audience isn’t supposed to know that they’re tiny. But miniatures have been used to create expansive sets for films like The Grand Budapest Hotel, the castle from Harry Potter, and the opening gates of Jurassic World. They’ve also been used to create fantasy vehicles that would be too expensive or too impossible to build at human scale, such as the spaceships from E.T., Asteroid City, and the Razor Crest from The Mandalorian. Miniatures have also been used to blow up entire buildings, like in Inception or the White House from Independence Day.

For The Grand Budapest Hotel, the miniature was 4 meters (13 feet) wide and built in 18th scale. To make the miniature look realistic, they used wood and special African woods with a very fine structure, and put a lot of detail into the paint and patina. They also used a forced perspective technique, with different scales in the foreground, middle, and background. To make the miniatures look the correct size on camera, filmmakers use a shallow depth of field and a wide angle lens. but I was wrong.

Three things determine how an image looks: the length of the lens, the distance to an object, and the amount of light entering the camera. Longer lenses create a more compressed image with more parts out of focus, while wider lenses are better for shooting models up close. When shooting models, it is important to keep the plane of focus shallow so only a small portion of the frame is in focus and everything else is blurry. If shooting a real car, the photographer would need to be further away to capture the same angle, resulting in more of the frame being in focus. Movies like “Game Night” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” use strategically blurry photography to create a certain effect. For miniatures, it is important to have every part of the model in focus so it looks bigger, which can be achieved by decreasing the amount of light entering the camera. Bright sunlight can counteract this issue. The composition of a shot also matters, such as the opening shot of the original “Star Wars” which used two planets to create an immediate reference point of a planetary scale. In addition, natural elements like water and fire don’t scale, so miniature sets must be built at a large scale, and CGI is often used to add water and explosions. Whether to use miniatures or CGI varies between directors, with some preferring the old-fashioned techniques and others wanting the organic messiness of filming a real thing. Nowadays, even in commercials, they are using miniatures. It’s an artistic choice for me. The spaceship we created looks very different from other spaceships. We had a lot of fun creating this big model, which was nearly 3 meters (9.8 feet) wide. The spaceship was a mix of handmade stuff inside and all the sides were laser cut. It took us about three months to complete due to the ongoing process. Initially, there were only two people working on it, but at the end, there were six people. So, it took us more or less three months for this kind of complicated model.