{"id":8930,"date":"2018-03-06T05:00:58","date_gmt":"2018-03-06T10:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=8930"},"modified":"2018-06-28T13:31:38","modified_gmt":"2018-06-28T17:31:38","slug":"the-real-history-of-miniaturizing-people-in-the-movies-a-response-to-wired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/the-real-history-of-miniaturizing-people-in-the-movies-a-response-to-wired\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real History of Miniaturizing People in the Movies: a Response to Wired"},"content":{"rendered":"

In January, Wired magazine released a video<\/a> that, in their words, \u201cbreaks down the history of people miniaturization in movies.\u201d VFX Supervisor Jamie Price covers films through the decades depicting humans who have been shrunken down or were tiny to begin with. While he does an expert job of explaining the technical processes used to make actors look smaller, something about the piece concerns me \u2014 and it isn\u2019t just the fact that whole thing is a thinly disguised promo for Downsizing.<\/i> It\u2019s the first line.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the first primary uses of visual effects to shrink people was in the movie The Bride of Frankenstein<\/i> in 1935,\u201d begins Price. With that remark, he sweeps the first decades of film history under the rug, ignoring not just an entire era of filmmaking, but also the filmmakers who invented the very effects he later discusses. In doing so, he has overlooked perhaps the single most fascinating fact about miniaturizing humans in film: that the concept is over a hundred years old. The Wired video may illuminate a smattering of films with a shrinking theme, but it completely bypasses the origin story.<\/p>\n

It begins with magic.<\/p>\n

As a stage magician, Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s was particularly obsessed with trickery. When he began to make his own films after seeing an exhibition by the Lumi\u00e8re brothers, he first turned to magic acts for subject matter, recreating tricks he had performed for audiences at his Paris theater. By accident, he stumbled onto the still-used technique known as the substitution splice<\/a>, and the magician-turned-filmmaker was soon experimenting with scenarios that relied on camera trickery rather than sleight-of-hand. The forced-perspective technique that Price talks about in Darby O\u2019Gill and the Little People<\/i> in 1959? M\u00e9li\u00e8s was using it in the 1890s. Soon after, M\u00e9li\u00e8s was incorporating not only multiple exposures and dissolves, but also substitution splices, superimpositions, split screens, and time-lapse photography into his short films.<\/p>\n

M\u00e9li\u00e8s began to play with time and space and discovered that he had a particular affinity for making items \u2014 and people \u2014 appear to change in size. He first played with the concept of size for comedic effect, using substitution splices in Addition and Subtraction <\/i><\/a>(1900) to change three women into one large woman, and then change the large woman into a child. The fact that they are all wearing the same costume supports the joke that they are morphing into different sizes, though it\u2019s obvious they are completely different actors. His first film to feature a single individual changing size (and probably the first film ever to do so) is The Devil and the Statue<\/i><\/a> in 1901. In the short film, a devil grows to the size of a giant and shrinks back down again, an effect M\u00e9li\u00e8s achieved with a dolly technique he invented, moving the camera forward and back with a pulley attached to a little wagon on a track.<\/p>\n