I want it

As you have seen I have a well known passion for photography and that has led me to pursue the use of techniques of postprocessing quite frequently. One I found particularly interesting is the Tilt-Shift technique. Originally achieved optically through lenses that had the possiblility to rotate on the vertical axis, it is now easy to emulate on the most basic of postprocessing software¹. The effect resulting in making everything on the picture look miniature.

All I have just mentioned came all back to me while looking at Andrea Wong’s last blog post where she mentioned the technique was used in Disneyland’s advertising. So I did some research and found out, on a post in AdFreak blog, that this has been a quite popular trend in advertisement. Of course the original procedure applies only to still pictures as used quite wisely by car manufacturers (Mazda and Land Rover) and toy stores (Toys’R’Us):

The miniature effect makes everything look like a toy

The effect here makes the whole world look smaller, thanks to the included GPS

The effect is used in here to make the difficult task performed by the car look like a kid’s game
(All pictures are taken from AdFreak blog post)

Of course videos are just still images one after the other so with a big enough budget and loads of time you can create a video of miniature people moving. A couple of other examples:

All the cases presented though this post are great examples of understanding the features of your product and using available new technology (specially one that had become even viral on the internet, with thousands of people posting their miniaturized pictures) to promote your product by producing a feeling in the consumer’s head. One of the most famous quotes in history is: “A picture is worth a thousand words”, why not use the power of image association wisely to translate into a stronger brand association? But be careful, you don’t want your Land Rover to look like a toy car…

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¹I discovered that following the posts in the photography blog dZoom (in Spanish)