Miniature models are awesome. Scale models of buildings and landscapes are such precious objects crafted by their creators with precision and care. They are built to capture a moment in time – to freeze the idyll of a bygone American landscape of railroad depots and bustling main streets, or to visualize the critical moments of an epic battle across an open field. I love the sense of omniscience that models provide – we can peer into windows, look down alleyways, and see this whole vast creation laid out before us on a single horizon.
Their scale and detail can be breathtaking at times. We recently visited the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, where Howard Tibbals' vast model of the fictitious Howard Bros. Circus is on display (pictured left). Tibbals has been working on the 3,800-square-foot model for over 50 years, and he claims it is still incomplete. In Shartlesville, Pennsylvania, you can visit Roadside America, a model train village that was also the single-minded creation of one man, Laurence Gieringer. In both of these models, the time scale is altered as well; every few minutes, darkness falls over of the scene to mark the passing of another day. At Roadside America, each nightfall is marked by a projection of the Statue of Liberty on the horizon, as well as one of Jesus, and the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner.
Their scale and detail can be breathtaking at times. We recently visited the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, where Howard Tibbals' vast model of the fictitious Howard Bros. Circus is on display (pictured left). Tibbals has been working on the 3,800-square-foot model for over 50 years, and he claims it is still incomplete. In Shartlesville, Pennsylvania, you can visit Roadside America, a model train village that was also the single-minded creation of one man, Laurence Gieringer. In both of these models, the time scale is altered as well; every few minutes, darkness falls over of the scene to mark the passing of another day. At Roadside America, each nightfall is marked by a projection of the Statue of Liberty on the horizon, as well as one of Jesus, and the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner.
Every day is the Fourth of July/Christmas at Roadside America.
When deployed in movies, models can show a landscape tranquil and pristine a few brief moments before it is ravaged by a dam burst or an earthquake. Unlike with computer-generated effects, even if we can see the inconsistent shadows, the absence of people, or any other tell-tale sign of a movie miniature, any kid who has ever built a diorama can identify with the magic of movie making. The science fiction film Moon, one of my favorites of the past year, eschewed CGI for its moonscapes in favor of models, and the results are brilliant. Iinterestingly, the main character, played by Sam Rockwell, is seen throughout the film whittling his own miniature village to pass the time on the solitary moon base.
Now, what if we could reverse this process of movie trickery – rather than make the small look big, we make the big look small, and we can capture the wonderment of miniature models in the world around us without the tedium of a lifetime of whittling and painting? Behold the magic of tilt-shift photography, a technique that makes ordinary scenes of the real world appear to be carefully constructed tiny models. The process works by shallowing and narrowing the depth of field in photographs, shrinking the area that is in focus either through the use of special lenses or by digital manipulation of pictures. Suddenly, your neighborhood can be transformed into a block in Roadside America, or a neighborhood waiting to be trampled beneath Godzilla's foot.
You can make your own tilt-shift photographs with the aid of an online tool, tiltshiftmaker.com. The results are endlessly pleasing, and I've spent hours miniaturizing my entire life – the photograph above is a picture I took along the water on the north shore of Staten Island. One stunning example of this technique I recently stumbled across is a short film by Sam O'Hare titled "The Sandpit," which depicts New York City in miniature. I especially like the water scenes, even though they look the least like miniatures – water can be a giveaway of a miniature, since water droplets can't be scaled down to size – because the boats resemble toys in a pond. If you would like to learn more about how this film was made, check out this interview with the creator.
The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.
Finally, if a digital simulation of a miniaturized New York City is not satisfying for you, just visit the Queens Museum of Art, where they have the city's Panorama, a scale model of every building in the city built before 1992 – that's 895,000 buildings arrayed over 9,335 square feet. Created for the 1964 World's Fair on the orders of Robert Moses, who lorded over the city as if it were his own personal model, the Panorama has gone through several updates and overhauls since its unveiling. The museum offers free tours of the Panorama every Saturday and Sunday at 4 p.m.
