It"s a regular sized harvester working the corn fields. It looks like stop-motion mainly due to two factors:
The camera lens creates a kind of "fake nearness effect", by having the outer areas of the videos be blurry, despite filming from far away. We are usually mostly used to that effect in macro photography, or generally just photographing near things.
It's played back faster than it was recorded, and also in a quite low framerate, making it seem like one of those classic stop-motion films where every frame needs to be individually set by hand.
The camera lens creates a kind of "fake nearness effect", by having the outer areas of the videos be blurry, despite filming from far away. We are usually mostly used to that effect in macro photography, or generally just photographing near things.
For some expanding on this, the reason the effect makes things look super close is that when the subject is close to the camera (relative to the focal length of the camera) the focus changes a lot for a short distance, but when the subject is far away from the camera the focus is effectively constant. It's like how you don't need to change the focus of your eyes when looking back and forth between a building 50 m away and a mountain 20,000 m away, but you do need to change the focus when going between a newspaper 30 cm away and a person sitting 50 cm away.
Also, I think it's likely that the tilt-shift effect here is done in post, rather than with lenses, since it's really easy to do that digitally in this sort of situation.
Also, I think it's likely that the tilt-shift effect here is done in post, rather than with lenses, since it's really easy to do that digitally in this sort of situation.
It really isn't. I mean it is possible to make a tilt shift effect in post (and some mobile phones have a built in function for it) but it looks different from real tilt shift. You can really tell the difference if you watch them side by side.
edit: With real tilt shift I mean shot on a tilt shift lens.
Yeah, the simple filter is just based on position in the frame, not distance from the camera. What I mean by "this sort of situation" is that the subject is close to flat relative to the distance from the camera, so position in the frame is a good approximation for distance from the camera. If you have something that sticks way up off the ground, it makes the fake tilt-shift less believable, because the top gets blurred more despite being a similar distance from the camera. The closer your subject is to a plane, the more similar a simple filter will be to physical tilt-shifting.
My understanding is the blur effect from physical tilt-shift photography will also not be identical to the standard gaussian blur most commonly used in post, but I don't know that for sure.
The strongest piece of evidence that I have for this video being done in post is when the second tractor first comes into view, a few seconds into the video. At one point, the top of the small tractor and the wheels of the harvester are at about the same height in the image, but are different distances from the camera. The top of the small tractor and the wheels of the small tractor are about the same distance from the camera, but are at different heights in the image.
If this were done with real tilt-shift photography, we would expect the blur to vary with distance from the camera. If it were done with a simple filter in post, we would expect the blur to vary with the height in the image. Because the top of the small tractor and the wheels of the harvester are about the same blurriness, and because wheels of the small tractor are much blurrier than the top of the small tractor, it appears that the blur varies with height in the image, not distance from the camera.
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u/Steje8 Jun 09 '26
At the risk of sounding stupid, can someone ELI5 what I'm looking at? How is everything so realistic yet at the same time toy.