Designer Paul Boyington: Hollywood’s Master Miniaturist : Television: His most recent creation is the U.S.--from sea to shining sea--for the opening segment of ‘Into the Night With Rick Dees.’

On a recent hot day, Paul Boyington took some time out from his work to pose for a photo in Hollywood. The logistics of the shot proved to be no easy task. It turned out, in fact, that Boyington was too big to fit in Hollywood, so he had to settle for a photo of himself somewhere over Hollywood.

“You mind if I stand here?” the photographer asked, towering over the corner of Sunset and Vine. Boyington, equally gargantuan, crouched precariously close to Las Vegas to pose near the Hollywood Hills, where a member of his crew painstakingly adjusted the white letters of the Hollywood sign.

Seconds later the image was recorded on film: Boyington, as Captain of the Universe.

A director/designer who combines TV and film visual effects with live action, Boyington is certainly the captain of his universe. He specializes in constructing miniature landscapes--as he describes it, “building miniature worlds”--within an ordinary-looking warehouse in Culver City. His work has appeared in the TV series “Monsters,” “Friday the 13th” and “War of the Worlds,” the film “Nightmare on Elm Street II” and numerous commercials.

“I’ve always liked controlling the world rather than going on location and taking what I get,” he said, by way of explaining his love for the smaller-than-life.

Boyington and his crew were putting the finishing touches on his most recent empire, which spread across a 50-foot platform against a twilight studio sky: the United States--complete with fruited plains, purple mountains’ majesty and shining seas--but at a fraction of the size. It had been created for the opening of ABC’s weeknight comedy show “Into the Night With Rick Dees,” starring the local radio personality, which premieres tonight (midnight on Channels 7 and 10, 1 a.m. on Channels 3 and 42).

The opener--or main title sequence, as it’s called--is a fantasy in which Dees, sitting near the window of a small Hollywood office, tosses out a paper airplane. “But not any paper airplane,” Dees explained in a telephone interview. “This one takes on a mind of its own and takes you across America every night.”

The plane flies out the window, “swoops down on Hollywood, (passes) the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, takes a dive down on Texas, goes into overdrive in St. Louis through the arch, flies across Middle America, down south, and takes a quick turn around Washington,” Dees said.

“At the end, it goes around the Statue of Liberty, and she reaches down and throws the airplane at warp factor seven, and it pierces the universe, which crumbles and falls down, exposing the set of ‘Into the Night.’ The whole ride lasts about 30 seconds.”

That ride is a journey across Boyington’s model, which includes trompe l’oeil replicas of well-known landmarks--such as Seattle’s Space Needle and the Capitol Records Building in Hollywood. At first, it looks realistic enough to fool even the most wide-awake viewer.

“I wanted to get a very real look,” Boyington said. “I wanted to have the viewer buy into the reality at the start of the segment, which gets more surreal and whimsical as it goes on.”

Surreal touches include scaled-up versions of local or regional symbols. A pair of brown cowboy boots is planted smack in the middle of Texas. Boyington’s home state of Washington is adorned with a normal-sized apple--relatively huge, considering the airplane-throwing Statue of Liberty at the end of the segment is a petite 13 inches high.

“His attention to detail is amazing,” Dees said. “This is really cutting-edge technology.”

Indeed, to make such an idea fly, so to speak, took technological wizardry beyond merely constructing a realistic miniature landscape. Boyington also oversaw the necessary animation, matting and computer enhancement done by a crew of more than 20 free-lance model-makers, designers, cinematographers and editors.

“You have to solve problems all the way through, which is what makes this fun,” Boyington said, citing his most difficult dilemma as having the viewer make the seamless transition through the window of Dees’ ‘office,’ filmed on one set and in full scale, into the miniature America, another set.

Controlling the path of the airplane after it left Dees’ hand actually meant filming the plane against a blue background, which on film appears invisible. While the airplane remained static, the camera moved according to a computer program, making the plane appear to swoop and dip. The same camera motions were repeated across the model of America, and the two images were edited together, so that the plane seems to fly under the St. Louis Arch and over mountain ranges.

Getting the latex-rubber-and-wire Statue of Liberty to grasp and throw the airplane was accomplished through stop-motion animation, in which the movement of Liberty’s arm was photographed frame-by-frame. Played back in real time, this kind of animation appears to be one smooth action.

Boyington often mixes different techniques within a single project, and he enjoys working with actors as much as with animation and miniatures. “I like to combine the best of visual effects with the best of traditional filmmaking,” he said. “The technology doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t enhance the film’s storytelling.”