Forced perspective
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Forced perspective is a filmmaking technique employed to make larger objects appear smaller to the viewer or vice versa, depending on their relationship to the camera and each other. Forced perspective creates an optical illusion, used primarily to make objects appear far away when set space is limited. Movies (especially B-movies) in the 50's and 60's are notorious for obvious and badly done forced perspective angles. Examples of forced perspective:
- Imagine a scene in an action/adventure movie in which dinosaurs are threatening the heroes. By placing a miniature model of a dinosaur close to the camera (and possibly making the model blurry), the dinosaur may look monstrously tall to the viewer, even though it is just closer to the camera.
- Imagine another scene in which two characters are supposed to be interacting in the foreground of a vast cathedral. Instead of actually filming in a cathedral, the director mounts a large painting of a cathedral's interior in a studio and films the actors talking in front of the painting. This gives the effect on film that the characters are in the foreground of a large room, when in reality they are standing next to a flat surface.
Forced perspective can be made more believable when studio environmental conditions obscure the difference in perspective. For example, the final scene of the famous movie Casablanca takes place at an airport in the middle of a storm, although the entire scene was shot in a studio. This was accomplished by using a painted backdrop of an aircraft, which was "serviced" by little people standing next to the backdrop. A downpour (created in-studio) draws much of the viewer's attention away from the backdrop and extras, making the simulated perspective less noticeable.
These are rather extreme examples of a technique that is often moderately used in cinematography.
The example below, taken from Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, is one notable instance.
The shot begins at left, a closeup of a man and his dog, with the small house in the distance. A continuous slow pullback ends at right, revealing the man, dog, and the entire farmhouse setting to be enclosed in the columned courtyard. The shot was accomplished by building the farmhouse setting in miniature, and placing it closely behind the man and dog, shooting with lenses chosen to make the house appear distant at first. Template:Endspoiler Peter Jackson's film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings employ an almost constant forced perspective. Characters apparently standing next to each other would be staged dispaced by several feet in depth from the camera. This, in a still shot, makes some characters appear unnaturally small (for the Dwarves and Hobbits) in relation to others. A new technique developed for The Fellowship of the Ring was an innovation of this principle which could be used in moving shots. Portions of the sets were mounted on movable platforms which would move precisely according to the movement of the camera, so that the optical illusion would be preserved at all times for the duration of the shot. The same techniques were used in the Harry Potter movies to make the character Hagrid look like a giant. Note that props around Harry and his friends are of normal size, while identical props placed around Hagrid are smaller. The Potter movies and the Lord of the Rings films also use big rigs, oversized robots dressed to look like the characters.
Another method is to film the actions of the "smaller" character on a set with normal-sized props, film the matching actions of the "large" character on an identical but smaller set, then combine the footage digitally.
Another famous example used for comic effect can be found in the slapstick comedy Top Secret! in a scene which appears to begin as a close up of a ringing phone with the characters in the distance. However when the character walks up to the phone (towards the camera) and picks it up it becomes apparent that the phone is extremely oversized instead of close to the perspective of the camera.