How to use a MODEL CAR to make your film (forced perspective trick!)

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Steve Ramsden here with DIY Moviemaking and this week I’m going to show you how you can use a model car to make your low budget film look much more expensive! So let’s say you want to get some shots with an expensive car in your film - you can’t afford the real thing, but maybe you can afford a scale model. If so, you can use forced perspective to make it appear full size. To demonstrate this I’m going to be using this model of a 1964 Aston Martin DB5, which is the famous car used by James Bond, first seen in with Sean Connery in “Goldfinger”.

Now this is a totally ‘in camera’ method of filmmaking which requires no tricky editing or compositing at all, but if you fancy a more advanced method which does require some editing, you can check out my other video on that as well.

So for this basic in-camera version, all you need is your model and a camera. When choosing a model car to use, the bigger the better, and a popular size is 1:18, as this gives a lot more detail than smaller models.

Once you have your model, you need to pick a location with enough space so you can line up a real background behind it, and put your model on something low near the camera.

This is one of the oldest Hollywood tricks in the book and is known as ‘forced perspective’ where you simply put something close to the camera to make it appear larger.

When lining up your model with your real background, the easiest method is to not show the ground at all, and basically just put the car’s tires along the very bottom of the frame. But this can also be a big giveaway that you are looking at a model. So if you want to be a little more advanced, then you could also build a fake section of road, such as what I did here just using a wooden board and some scenic scatter from a model shop to look like tarmac or gravel. This way you can raise the camera up a little bit higher and this can help fool the brain that the car isn’t a model - because otherwise the road would have to be a model too, and guess what - it is!

You also want to look for the edge of the real road and try and line this up with your fake road. If can be tricky to get the angles right here, but it will really help disguise the join.

You will also want to film in ‘deep focus’ meaning you’re trying to get the foreground and the background both in focus at the same time. If you’re using a phone and you’re in bright sunlight it might do this automatically, but I would suggest doing it manually so that nothing changes, and if so this means you’ll need to change your aperture to the highest f-number you can see displayed. And if you want to see lots more tips on filming miniatures to make them look full scale, then I have a dedicated video on just that.

Now assuming you want to appear in the shot next to your car like I did, you also need to try and line yourself up at the right size. This is much easier with two people - one to film and one to appear in the frame - but If you are filming this alone like I did, then you’ll probably need a way of monitoring your shot yourself. I did this using an app on my phone called Canon Camera Connect, that lets me use my phone as a monitor to see my camera’s view, as long as I don’t walk too far away. This way I could see if I was in the right place, and then I could put my phone away while I filmed the shot.

I also tried an option where I made it look like I was leaning against the car. Now obviously you can’t interact with it much or move in front of it, but can look like you are standing behind it or even looking in the windows. Again, after some trial and error if you get the angles right, this will all help.

One of the best things about a fully practical in-camera effect like this is that your model and your scene behind will perfectly match. As long as your model isn’t sitting under any shade, no matter what the weather is doing on the day, your light on the foreground will be the same as the background. So will the direction of your shadows - this car is still being lit by the sun and from the same angle as what’s behind it. And if the car is shiny, it will even have all the correct reflections of its actual surroundings. It’s little details like these that make our minds just accept that this car really is in this location - because of course it is, it’s just smaller than it looks! So always remember that in-camera practical effects can add a lot of their own free realism without you even realising it!

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