Special Effects Explained: How They Make People Look Shorter/Taller In The Movies

They actually don’t use computer graphics to shrink the characters. That would look pretty bad.

 When they were shooting “Lord of the Rings,” sometimes the solution was simple: they would use a child in a wig to represent a Hobbit.

Other times they would shoot two different actors, and stick Frodo’s face onto his body double. But the coolest trick of all that they use is called ‘Forced Perspective.’

The idea is that you put one actor really far from the camera and the other one really close to the camera, then shoot at such an angle that it appears they are next to each other and that one of them is really big and the other really small. Which sounds simple, until you realize that you need to build everything on the set so that the actors can interact with it at the same time while hiding the fact that they’re far away from each other. 

An example of the ‘Forced Perspective’ is the scene with Gandalf’s cart. In the movie, Frodo and Gandalf are sitting side by side:

But this is how the real life scene looked:

However, this technique works when the camera remains perfectly still. Another example of ‘Forced Perspective:’

Image Courtesy: Cracked