Practical Perspective in I'M A VIRGO
I’m a Virgo's 13-foot-tall-boy conceit relies heavily on perspective tricks, which require specific lighting, attention to eyelines, and carefully composed reverse-shots all help 'sell' the effect, in addition to practical elements such as custom sets and props.
For example this shot from the I'm a Virgo pilot involve ‘weights’ made from beer kegs, composing a shot where Cootie (Jharrel Jerome) and his friends look like they’re standing together, and ‘selling’ the whole thing with a low-angle reverse shot carefully lit and blocked so it seems all in the same physical space as the wide shot.
VFX supervisor Jamie Barty talks about using forced perspective in scenes like this:
A lot of the shots where Cootie is shown to be 13 feet tall are in-camera. Todd and his team would plan every single shot with both big and small characters. It was a lot of camera trickery, like The Lord of the Rings, with forced perspective. If someone is close to the camera, they look bigger. Cootie was always twice as close to the camera as everybody else on the scene, plus he was standing on a platform, so he looked really big.
But now you’ve got the problem that all the rest of the actors are twice as far away, so they might be 50 feet away while Jharrel, who plays Cootie, is 25. There’s a 25-foot gap now, so when they’re trying to interact with each other, there’s a lot to figure out. They used on-set puppets to help with that. There was a literal 13-foot version of Cootie as a puppet, and they would put him in the scene first to make sure the actors knew where Cootie was going to be and where to look if they were speaking to him. They had little puppets around Jharrel, so he knew how low to look. We also had miniature sets around Cootie. So, for example, when he bumps his head on the ceiling, he’s actually bumping his head on something.
Speaking of those keg-weights, I love how inventive and ‘lived in’ the props feel — teeny burgers with crumpled foil wrapping, tiny comic books (which are also made in 'full size' for other actors to interact with) complete with ad pages and a bonus joke about the burger’s "actual size" claim.
Things like “hamburgers” in real life ranges in size from teeny sliders to oversized triple Whopper, and they’re also hard to show in relation to two people at once.
On the other hand, almost everyone watching has a general sense of scale and weight of cars in relation to themselves, and I’m a Virgo can show cars with Cootie and his ‘regular’ size friends in them at the same time.
It’s also fun and inherently impressive to play with cars on this scale — one car seems like set dressing until Cootie starts bench-pressing it, and soon after several shots depict him riding in another car, using multiple angles to sell it / show off.
The interview with Jamie talks about the car ride scene, as well as several others.
If you haven’t watched the series yet, it’s a blast, currently on Amazon Prime, and great fun to see some of the gags before digging into how they were made.
IMDB
I’m a Virgo - dir. Boots Riley, DP Steve Annis and Eric Moynier
Additional Resources
I’m a Virgo makes an homage with custom LOVE/HATE knuckle props
Podcast with I’m a Virgo’s Visual effects supervisor Todd Sheridan Perry
Creator and Director Boots Riley talks about the fun and frustrations of playing with practical and technical effects at such a high level