How to Create Tilt-Shift / Miniature World Time-lapses

Today, I want to show you how to do time-lapses that look like you’re in a miniature or tiny world, aka the tilt-shift effect.

In reality, this is a simple technique that can be done in any editing program. I'm going to show how to do it in FCPX, but once you see what I do here I think you can follow along in AE, Photoshop, or Premiere.

But before I get to that, I should probably explain why this technique is called the tilt-shift effect. That’s simply because you can simulate this miniature world on larger scales with a tilt-shift lens.

I think the blur technique is fairly straightforward in the video.

However, to get the effect right, I think it’s good to do a few more things other than just blur it. First, models like the legos we shot are usually painted with vibrant and saturated colors. That means you need to up your saturation, contrast and sharpness

Other than that, it's up to your creativity. To wrap up my suggestions, here are three general rules to do after you do the blurring.

1. Get the angle right - pointing down at 30-45 degrees
2. Make keep that contrast and saturation up.
3. Keep the shutter speed fairly fast - 1/60th or faster.

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[marclorence]

Omg! The one with the construction workers is crazyyyY! Nice vid!

[OliverPassemard]

I thought I would put on my $.02 on the topic. I think the essence of tilt shift is that it removes the focal point so that the perspective is gone. In that sense, shooting as if you're replicating a miniature set is great, but I would only add that there has to be a lots of lines in the shot to give the best impression that the perspective is gone. That was originally how i went about it and I found great success.

[MacGuffinSC]

This gave me a lot of cool ideas to try out when I eventually get my order from DJI. Good show.

[davidbkopp]

Amazing tutorial. I'm going to refer to this quite a bit! Here are a few alternative ideas.
COLOR: The color needs to be vibrant, not because people tend to paint things in bright colors (the green of the mini bush could be as bright as my green bathing suit). Instead it's because all colors appear brighter close up than far away. Why? Light pollution. The further an object is from the viewer (or camera) generally the more light, and certainly the more sediment between them. This is why mountains in the far distance appear lighter and tend to blend in to the same color as the sky. So the best way to do this is to make sure that the 'brightness' is adjusted. Saturation and contrast help, but the main point is that the image should not apear washed out, because that's not what things look like up close.

SHARPNESS & GRAIN: The grain and shaprness are important because we can see so much more detail when looking at small objects up close. Lint, dust, imperfections, these all come into full focus when you're up close. So sharpness and grain help simulate this experience and create the illusion of detail that isn't really there.

SPEED & SCALE: These things are coupled. First let's talk about speed. The tilt-shift videos are sped up, not because we tend to see close-up game play sped up. It's because things appear to move faster from point A to B when you're up close. Imagine a kid playing with a train set. The kid isn't going to adjust for scale and move the train exactly according to what it would look like if we were birds looking down at that size train, right? He's gonna just move his hand quickly to make the train move ... which according to scale is way faster than it would actually look like it's going. So the train moves 6 inches. It would take a hand about 1 second to move it that far. So now back to the video. When you record video with a tilt shift lens of a REAL train moving and play it back at regular speed, the train looks tiny, so the train looks like it's moving about 6 inches because of the tilt shift. But there's a problem. If you play the video at its normal speed, it will seem like it's taking forever for the mini-train to move 6 inches! A kid's hand would just zoom it over in one second! Of course in reality what was filmed was not 6 inches, it's 200 feet. So it takes longer to move that far in real life. So what you do? You speed up the film (or do a time lapse)! When you do that it makes it look like all the little moving things are really in a toy model, and you're looking at it up close. BUT!!! Remember, that there's a direct relationship between the distance between your lens and the moving objects and how fast they are going. Most often, time-lapses are TOO FAST. They look too fast for the scale we would imagine tiny models. With the train is moving, for example, 6-inches in .1 second. And that makes the model look extra tiny, which is okay but, I'd say try to play with the speed as well.

[MrAndyballard]

You have some of the most listenable tutorials on YT, another great job. Oh... and congratulations on not using the most common verbal tick ‘you guys’ every 5 seconds ! it really does make such a difference.

[impguardwarhamer]

Currently planning on doing some film work that will require making small models look big, so this was kinda interesting trying to understand what the effect is and how you make big things look small in order to reverse-engineer it to do the opposite

[stephenmcdevitt]

I have been looking for the name of this effect for weeks, thanks you

[kashisman]

I love all art of lapses, they are all awesome

[dylannolan]

Thank you so much there is not enough tilt shift content.

[Randuski]

If anyone is seeing this, and wondering WHY this makes things look miniature: it's because of depth of field. When you're photographing something really close, the depth of field is really thin. But if you're really far away, even at a huge aperture, everything is gonna be in focus at that distance. But, if you cheat it, and create a shallow depth of field on something that's far away, it tricks the brain, and your brain thinks "obviously it must be tiny, and really close"

[esgee]

Good one. Also, another benefit of using this editing technique vs tilt-shift lens to produce tilt shift effect is that when you get a subject with unknown trajectory across the frame, like the guy with his bike, you can determine the 'slice of the focal plane in focus after the fact.

[afterfurtherreview]

This is an awesome technique! Another quality video.

[NeilsIn]

I think I originally found your channel for time-lapses! Been a keen follower ever since. Keep up the great work guys!

[himantak]

Out of the world bro!! superb!! Thanks a lot

[UjamesH]

Loved the thorough and thoughtful explanation

[kikakapu]

Enjoying your work/channel/tutorials very much, keep up the good work!

[gaymensbizzareadventure]

Im here after dailydoze of the internet.

[konstapelwalander]

A quick tip on an issue I always run into and that I saw 1:49 in this video. When you apply blur, the edge pixels will become transparent, showing the layer behind (I believe it is the clip with your hair?). This is easily fixed by scaling the clip up. Thanks for a great tutorial. Cheers!

[simonmuu]

clicked because of Bled island. Stayed because of an awesome tutorial

[Abb]

This is not actually what I searched for, but thanks for sharing ...great info