Hobbits: Forced Perspective
24 October 2009
This question is so 2002, but as I was re-watching the LOTR trilogy recently, I was curious as to how they made the hobbits look so small when filmed with other characters. You don’t know the answer either, thankfully the Internet does. The technique is called forced perspective where the optical illusion of various scales and distances is simply adjusted by the distance between the subjects and the camera. Two short videos of the technique worth watching: forced perspective in LOTR and forced perspective with a moving camera. Impressively realistic.