If im understading your question correctly ( to make someone look small, or someone small, the same size a someone normal).
Use the famous camera trick (done in production of course).

This trick applies in real life as well...When you hold your thumb up to your eye, its increadibly big, but the futher you hold it away, the smaller it gets. The one thing that tells you that your thumb is not "smaller" but only further away is your sense of depth. This comes from having 2 eyes.(ability to see 3Dimension)

To make a character smaller, simply place them further away from the camera than the other character is. Since a camera really only has one "eye" it cannot see depth. Your character that is further away will look very small where the person in the front will look like a giant. You can do this trick to make characters giants aswell, siply reverse the trick...putting the character closer to the camera and the others further away.

Play around with distances between characters until you get the sizes you want and camera angle to get the best shot.

I hope that'll help you out!

Visualization is the art of seeing things invisible.

thanx very much for the help. I understand what you are saying but I was just under the impression that people would make the assumption that the person is closer naturally through "relative size" perception. Would it be necessary for me to not show the ground in the shot? Thanx again : )

They used that trick in Lord of the Rings. One example of where they use it is when Gandalf and Pippin walk into the hall where Denethor is sitting. You see what looks like a big person walking beside a small person, whereas the one was actually way further back.

In Fellowship, near the beginning, they use the technique to have Frodo sit next to Gandalf in his cart. The bench twisted so that Frodo was actually sitting mostly behind Gandalf but onscreen it looked pretty good.

RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA

You can show the ground, just not at an angle that shows distance.
In other words, just make sure the horizon is level and straight, so it does not look like it falls into the background.
?8D?

Visualization is the art of seeing things invisible.

quote:

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The actors will be overlapping by the way

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This is the hard part. I think you ahve to put the camera on a tripod and shoot the two characters separately with one in the distance and one close up, hiding their feet so you can't see who is in front of whom when you digitally composite them into the same scene.

The advantage of this is you get both characters in focus which helps make them appear to be in the same area. The problem with this is if you want them to truly interact timing is going to be tough and I'm not sure how they could touch or pass an object from one to another.

If you want one character to look like a giant perhaps standing in the distance do this. Shoot the small character at a distance but make sure they are in focus focus. Shoot the background so that the foreground grass, etc, is in focus but a distant tree is slightly out of focus. Shoot the giant character standing close to the camera also slightly out of focus. When the three are plopped together the tree and 'giant' should be slightly out of focus and the small guy and foreground grass will be in focus giving more of an illusion that the giant and tree are in the distance.

They did this all the time in the series Hercules and a version of this trick is used a lot when models are involved. In the movie Beastmaster there is a cityshot that had the little model city in front of the characters but it was made so that it looked as if they were looking at it in the distance. Even better they got burning torches on the model by carefully positioning little mirrors where the torches should be and putting real torches out of frame where they would reflect properly. I didn't notice the trick until the audio commentary and have to say for a cheezy movie it worked fairly well.

RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA

Basicly, it's all about cinematographer
Which means you can find the right angle
Or you can edit their size in Premiere

Nada Taufik
Film Maker
pink_rebels?filmsindie.com
http://www.filmsindie.com/pinkrebels

My personal opinion,
Doing the work in Pro will always look better than if it were done in post, just as long as it is done right.
Take the time and it will look better in the end if it is done in pro.?8D?

Visualization is the art of seeing things invisible.

To add to the examples - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has a fantastic sequence with Jim Carrey as a baby with Kate Winslet full size...

You can see it on the DVD, they made this awesome, very long kitchen table that slopes, and made the wallpaper/funiture/etc match, so it looks like the table is short and level, allowing full-sized Jim Carrey to appear baby-like in comparison!

Morgneto, Master of Morgnetism

Artofilm hit it. If you rehearse it and show the actors what they look like etc. They'll get it and it'll look good. The only thing, unless you have a wireless lav mac, I would do ADR (additional dialogue recording) in post.