A couple years ago, my dentist introduced me to a very talented special effects man named Rocco Gioffre. Rocco has worked on a lot of films, going all the way back to Blade Runner. Though he frequently works with computers today, he's always been a huge proponent of using traditional effects whenever possible. I visited his effects house and he showed me a bunch of stuff. But the thing I was most impressed by was some effects footage he showed me from the old "Young Sherlock Holmes" series. They did all kinds of stuff with forced perspective. That inspired me to do this very simple effects test using the same techniques.
A lot of people have asked me how I did this. These photos explain the basic principle. The trick is being able to match the fake pavement that the robot sits on to the real pavement in the background. I had a c-stand off-camera that was holding all sorts of little twigs and dowels to cast small shadows in the foreground to match the tree shadows in the background. I used a pencil to draw cracks in the pavement that matched the actual cracks in the pavement in the background. I also had three different colors of spray paint on hand because I kept having to adjust the color of the fake pavement to match the changing light conditions. Not as easy as it looks.
