Miniatures master cuts dramatic backdrops down to size for '10,000 BC'

FOR most little boys, tinkering with model trains doesn't lead to a viable career. But for Joachim Grüninger, it laid the tracks for a life as a miniature supervisor and visual effects guru.

Born in Stuttgart, Germany, the son of an engineer, Grüninger studied his father's trade for three years before a friend recruited him to work as a set decorator on 1985's "Joey," director Roland Emmerich's first movie after film school. "Working with my hands and with machines was always something that I liked, and so that made me move into this sort of craft," he says.

After several more Emmerich productions, Grüninger moved to Munich and founded the company Magicon in 1987. Since then he has designed miniatures for "The Pianist" and "The Day After Tomorrow." For Emmerich's latest epic, "10,000 BC," due in theaters Friday, Grüninger built the largest miniature of his career: a vast backdrop consisting of three pyramids, a palace and the River Nile.

Smaller than life: There was nothing diminutive about the 200-by-200-foot miniature set on "10,000 BC." "The bigger you build it, the better you can build it," Grüninger says. "The sheer size makes it easier to add the necessary amount of detail and that allows the camera to go closer and closer. It's easier to get the depth of field. And you don't want to have a soft, blurry foreground because that immediately makes it look like a miniature, toy train perspective."

Fantastic plastic: Grüninger chose to build his pyramids out of something a little more worker-friendly than giant blocks of stone. "As far as the materials go, there is, of course, wood," he says. "But most of the materials creating the surfaces are some sort of a resin or a plastic material. You pour it into a mold, and it hardens and the reaction takes place. So all the surfaces that you see in the movie that look like stone or even like the wooden scaffolding constructions that we put all over the pyramids are, as a matter of fact, the things that we'd cast in molds in large quantities. They're painted slightly differently, so you still believe that it's something that's manufactured by hand rather than from some sort of a modern factory assembly."