Filmmaker makes short films using incredibly detailed miniatures
This filmmaker makes painstakingly crafted shortfilms out of miniature sets and actors that he designed and created from scratch. Clemens Wirth, 37, from Innsbruck, Austria, specialises in creating short films out of miniatures. He has been working in the film industry since 2006 and started using miniatures in 2011 when he made a WWI film as part of his graduating project at the University of Salzburg. He said: "In 2006, I experimented with a mini dv camera and made one of my first short films. "It was a short stop-motion film which I made to impress a girl. I think this was really the time when I fell in love with filmmaking. "I started to realize that I work best when I’m alone and with miniatures. I have a wide variety of little actors, the model figures, which are ready to shoot at any time." Since then, he has been involved in projects like 'The Borrower', for BBC One and 'Welcome to Earth', with NatGeo. A single project can take months and sometimes years. Clemens first starts by writing a script and getting all the props together. He then spends weeks building the sets, shooting and editing. He said: "Miniatures are quite time consuming. "I mostly work alone from start to finish of a project, it’s difficult to say, but for a one-minute clip it takes around one to two months. "Sometimes I work four weeks on a Diorama, sometimes just four hours, if it’s a simple scene, but in general it’s very time consuming. "Miniatures are quite sensitive and sometimes things can go wrong during the building process. Re-building everything again, can be quite frustrating." The video shows the "making-of" one of his projects, a trailer he worked on for a video game titled 'This is the President'. It shows the process of his building the dioramas, his positioning of the figurines, and the actual filming of the trailer with specialised cameras. The entire project took two months from start to finish. We can also see sections of his showreel, a compilation of some of his favourite work that he's created over the years, for game trailers, short films, and other projects.