4/13/2008 - Ames Room

If you've watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I'm sure you've wondered how they were able to get the actors who played the Hobbits to look small compared to the other actors playing humans and elves. A lot of it was CGI, for sure... made all the more remarkable in that they had to shoot single scenes separately and then combine footage later with everything synced seamlessly. Other times, though, there was no CGI involved and the Hobbit actors would actually be on their knees with the other standing actors. This was obscured on film of course, but it was a very cheap yet effective way of portraying the size differences. And yet, another method of performing the illusion of live halflings was using an actual optical illusion. No CGI was involved, but rather a technique called forced-perspective was used. The actors were framed in a way where the backgrounds led you to believe they were in near proximity to each other even though in actuality the Hobbits were much farther in the background from the "full-sized" characters. Perhaps the best example of this optical illusion is the Ames Room, and for the best explanation of this phenomenon, read the Wikipedia article. But to see really see what this illusion is about, you can watch this video: