Shots with Forced Perspective – How They Trick Our Brains

Children often want to become magicians when they grow up. Filmmakers actually manage to. Not only because films are magic in their own right, but because we do use a lot of practical tricks to tell visual stories. Forced perspective is one of them. It has been around for a while, but it’s still impressive how it manages to fool our brains into seeing something that doesn’t match reality. What is forced perspective, how does it work, and in what ways can you implement it in your shots? Let’s find out.

Forced perspective (also sometimes known as “false perspective”) is a sort of optical illusion in photography or filmmaking. By positioning objects and the camera in a certain way in relativity to each other, this technique can alter the viewer’s perception of them, making something appear smaller, bigger, closer, or farther away than it actually is. Maybe you’ve come across these street art pieces, where something drawn on the ground suddenly becomes an impressive picture, but only from one standpoint. Forced perspective in films works in a similar way.

How forced perspective works

Think of a shot on which you’d like to try the forced perspective. Now run the imaginary z-axis from the camera outward. By strategically staging the characters or objects in the foreground and background along this axis, you can change the viewer’s perception of their scale.

To understand this effect better, let’s take a look at one of the common ways it is used in cinema. Namely, with miniatures. You might know that before VFX became such a huge thing, a lot of impressive worlds, especially fantasy ones, came alive in frames thanks to the extensive application of models. Of course, filmmakers had to film them cleverly, so that viewers would actually believe they are real. Sometimes, forced perspective was the answer. For example, the subsequent shot from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” When we see it, there is no question that it is a real ship in the middle of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. Yet it was actually just a ship’s model, placed close to the camera’s wide lens, and the Mojave Desert of California in the background.

Why does our brain buy this trick? The explanation is simple – our natural visual perception, and how it works with depth cues. (We talk about what depth cues are and all their kinds in a separate article.) In short, when we look at something, our brain instantly calculates its size based on its distance from us. Objects that are closer to us appear larger, and the ones that are farther away appear smaller. The forced perspective takes advantage of this effect by reversing it, as we’ve just witnessed above.

What about the motion?

Do you remember this scene from “The Lord of the Rings,” where Gandalf comes to Frodo, and they drink tea in the tiny hobbit’s home, talking about his dark inheritance?

Almost every film buff would explain to you how it was made. Yet allow me a short reminder, please. The film creators built a special table and set Gandalf in the foreground with small-scale props, while Frodo took place further down in the background at a larger table part. The actors faced each other with correctly aligned eyelines. It seemed from this camera angle as if the characters were talking across the table, but in reality, there was a gap between them, and they didn’t see each other at all. The effect made Frodo look tiny, just as all hobbits were.

Of course, it wasn’t a new invention – we’ve seen this exact trick in different movies throughout cinema history. However, what the creators of this epic adventure film did achieve for the very first time is to imply forced perspective in shots with a camera, moving through space. Normally, whenever you apply a 3D motion (read about 2D and 3D camera movements here), the illusion immediately falls apart. Therefore, “The Lord of the Rings” creators had to come up with a clever solution. And so they did. Please, welcome: motion control dolly for the cam, and a separate sliding platform with one of the actors on it, moving in sync with each other, but in a counter direction. Incredible, right?

Set design for the forced perspective

One of the reasons why forced perspective works so well in the “The Lord of the Rings” scene above is because all elements in the shot support the illusion. Including the requisites. Sometimes, you’ll need to build most of the set, so that the in-camera magic becomes authentic. Just like in this scene from “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” where Jim Carrey’s character suddenly becomes a child, looking like a tiny adult. In the subsequent video, the director Michel Gondry demonstrates the practical trick behind the scenes:

What do we see here? A room, where each of the set elements has an ordinary size in the foreground, but seamlessly becomes larger than life in the back. It all aligns so well with a specifically chosen camera angle that in the actual shot, we don’t notice a single wrong thing. Let’s rewatch it together (from 01:44):

How did it make you feel? I bet, weird. After all, it’s a grown-up man, hiding under the table! Yet that was exactly the intention. In the film’s plot, we’re browsing through Joel’s memories and dreams, and those usually defy the laws of physics and feel strange, magical, and unrealistic. So, forced perspective can also be a mighty storytelling tool.

Camera angle plays an important role

You don’t always need to build oversized sets to create an optical illusion. Yet you do need to decide on the camera angle in advance, before starting to stage your objects or actors (so, improvisation is difficult here). For example, the creators of the “Harry Potter” series used forced perspective a lot in scenes with Hagrid, a half-giant who was supposed to be around 8 feet tall (3m). To be fair, they used all the possible tricks to make him higher, including a double with a robotic face, filming on a green screen, and visual compositing. In many shots, though, the practical illusion was enough. When you think about it, camera angles alone can do so much. For instance, in the dialogue scenes, they would film an over-the-shoulder of Hagrid, making him huge relative to Harry, and then cut to a close-up shot from an extremely low angle. That helped to sell the character’s height without much additional effort.

The practical might of forced perspective

Why to use forced perspective nowadays, when the visual effects area is thriving? Well, firstly, some filmmakers love to catch as much as possible on camera. It’s a great joy to witness all effects in real life and know exactly what result you will get (and it’s super beneficial for acting as well).

Also, oftentimes, it’s much cheaper. Think of your short film on a budget. How much easier would it be to recreate the shot with a ship in a desert on set, using miniatures, as opposed to making it CGI? This is the reason why even blockbusters often implement a forced perspective solution. For example, this scene from the “Alien” franchise shows the Alien Hive.

There are rumors that this shot fooled even studio executives, who didn’t like the extravagantly huge sets and imagined the cost of building those. Yet this is just the forced perspective working its magic. The creators took the area right above the actors’ heads, made a xenomorph-encrusted roof a couple of feet wide (as opposed to 30-40 feet, it seems to be), and placed it close to the camera. Further in the background, they positioned the actual set and worked on an optical illusion. They also had to match the haze and the lighting. So, filmmakers moved small lights across their miniature ceiling in sync with the actor’s head torches. How savvy is this?

Similar solutions for making sets appear grand and majestic were used in Harry Potter’s Great Hall at Hogwarts, in diverse scenes in the “Star Wars” Universe, and in a lot of other major motion pictures.

Beware of the depth of the field

Now you know how forced perspective works and can apply it in your videos. Yet there is one detail we haven’t covered yet, and it’s important. You have to watch out for your depth of field. In the MZed course “Fundamentals of Directing,” instructor Kyle Wilamowski defines the term like this:

Depth of field is the distance between nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appears sharp and in focus in an image.

So, there are images that have low depth of field and high depth of field, and also varying degrees of those. To achieve a realistic-looking forced perspective, we need our depth of field to be as high as possible, so that elements in the foreground appear as sharp as the ones in the back. That means you should go for a closed aperture and ensure that you have enough lighting for it. Wide lenses are generally a good choice, as they also tend to exaggerate the optical illusion.

Conclusion

While forced perspective is a fun trick and a powerful tool, I believe we should not overuse it. The idea behind every technique is to support your story and help you achieve better visual results with clever solutions. After all, magic tricks only impress the audience when they are rare and not expected. If forced perspective distracts the audience from the story, then it is probably not the best choice.

What about your favorite forced perspective shots? Have you ever implemented this optical illusion yourself? If so, when and how? Let’s talk a bit more in the comments below!

Full disclosure: MZed is owned by CineD.

Feature image: film stills from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” by Steven Spielberg, 1977; “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” by Chris Columbus, 2001; “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” by Michel Gondry, 2004; and “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” by Peter Jackson, 2001.