Downsizing on Blu-Ray - A Chat with Visual FX Supervisor Jamie Price

Matt Damon and Kristin Wiig star in, Downsizing

Get Small, Live Large! That's the perfect tagline for Downsizing, the latest film from  Academy Award® Winning Director Alexander Payne starring Matt Damon.

The premise is simple. When scientists find a way to shrink humans to five inches tall, Paul Safranek (Academy Award® winner Matt Damon) and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) decide to ditch their stressed out lives in order to get small and live large in a luxurious downsized community. Filled with life-changing adventures and endless possibilities, Leisureland offers more than riches, as Paul discovers a whole new world and realizes that we are meant for something bigger.

In charge of creating the miniaturized  world was Visual Effects Supervisor Jamie Price.  A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Visual Effects Society, and the Director’s Guild of America, Jamie Price has worked as a Visual Effects Supervisor and Second Unit Director on more than 15 feature films.

His credits include Air Force One, Enemy of the State, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Son of the Mask, Australia, Pacific Rim, RoboCop, and more. He began his professional career in visual effects at Industrial Light & Magic. In addition to his film work, Price has lectured on visual effects at the University of Southern California in the Peter Stark Producing Program.

Shrinking actors, sets and props down to small size is a film technique that has been used since the early days of movies, and 80-year old camera tricks were matched with today’s advanced techniques to great effect on DOWNSIZING. Jamie and his team mastered  the illusion of fooling film goers into thinking people could be shrunk, while allowing Alexander to make a movie with the attention to actor performances and realism that have become hallmarks of all of Payne’s films.

Jason Sudeikis gets small in, Downsizing

I spoke with Jamie Price via satellite from Los Angeles about the challenges of making everything look miniature, how he managed to make it look so easy and much more. 

Downsizing is available now on Digital and will be available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD on March 20.