Simulating the Simulation

King Kong is probably not real. We can probably all agree on that. And even if he were, it's likely that he'd be rather ill-behaved. So when Merian C. Cooper went to shoot his 1933 classic, he couldn't exactly bring in the beast under the care of a qualified animal wrangler and just start shooting. So he did what many filmmakers do when they want to film something really big: they build something really small. However, as shooting miniatures slowly progressed from producing a disbelief-suspending approximation of reality to an indistinguishable simulacrum, an aesthetic emerged which came to have a life of its own, independent of eye-fooling special effects. Using a tilt-shift photgraphy, artists like Keith Loutit have reverse engineered this style to create beautiful, dreamlike visions in which, rather than using miniatures to simulate reality, the opposite effect is achieved.

In this clip, once-monster trucks are seemingly reduced to Tonka stature, and the cheering crowd appears as a sea of tiny figurines.

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Here, massive shipping crates become Legos and the ships that carry them float, as the title implies, in the world's busiest bathtub.

Bathtub V from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.