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CS 194-26 Final Project: Fake Miniatures and Vertigo Shot

by Larry Zhou

Overview

I chose fake miniatures and vertigo shot as my projects. Both projects were extremely interesting because of their use in photography and filmography. I had a lot of fun going around and taking the photos for the project. I would also to thank Professor Efros, Jun-Yun, and the readers for awesome projects and one of the most fun Computer Science courses I've taken.

Part A: Fake Miniatures

The purpose of the first part of the project was to simulate the effect of Tilt Shift, which is selective focus. By selecting a focus plane and applying a blurring filter to the rest of the image and increasing saturation, we can create the illusion of fake miniatures. I created a focus line by selecting two points, and from there, increased the blur outside of the focus line based on how far away a pixel was from the focus line. My fake miniatures looked a lot better on images that I grabbed from the internet than on the ones I took myself. I think that Fake Miniatures works best on images that have a bird's eye view but I wasn't physically capable of getting these shots.

UC Berkeley

In the picture of UC Berkeley, I did a focus on the whole campus as well as a focus on only Doe Library. source: berkeley.edu

Original
Miniature Campus
Miniature Doe

Italy

Original
Miniature Buildings

Lake Wedding

Original
Miniature House and People

Self-Taken Photos

Barrows and Campanile

Original
Miniature Barrows and Campanile
Miniature Barrows and Campanile with higher blur

Amazon Box

Original
Miniature Box

Durant Avenue

Original
Miniature Cars

Berkeley Hills

Original
Miniature Houses




Part B: Vertigo Shot

The Vertigo Shot or dolly zoom is an in-camera effect that was named after Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Vertigo. What happens is that you take pictures of an object from further and further away while zooming in to keep the object the same size. While the object remains the same size, the field of view gets narrower. I used an iPhone 7 Plus camera which has a pretty solid camera and zoom feature and is sometimes better than actual cameras. The hardest part about this project was keeping the object in the same position and size relative to its surroundings. However, it was super rewarding seeing the end result of the 4 images sittched together into a GIF

Solo Cup

Tinder Bottle

Wonka Hat

Bubba Gump Cup

Conclusion

The fake miniatures was a lot of fun messing around with. It was cool to see how two concepts that we've already learned (masking and gaussian filters) could be combined into creating a fun photography effect. The vertigo shot was also fun to mess around with, and it's amazing that an effect like that can be reproduced by most cameras. I also tried simulating vertigo shot through taking a video and although some of it looked good, my zooming speed didn't match by backing up.