10 Clever Tricks You Didn’t Realise Movies Played On You

8. The Lord Of The Rings' Forced Perspective

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New Line Cinema

Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings pictures were genuinely revolutionary in numerous ways, with each of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King all winning countless awards - including a bunch of Oscars.

Of course, key to these movies are the diminutive hobbits seen across the trilogy, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that the size difference between these characters and the more 'regular' sized figures of LOTR was achieved through some swanky CG-assisted green screen shenanigans.

In reality, these visuals were done practically and through some super-smart camera techniques from Jackson and his crew.

Placing actors further apart than they usually would be for a certain scene, Jackson utilised a forced perspective to have, say, Elijah Wood and Sir Ian McKellen appear next to each other and appear to be the relevant, respective heights for Frodo and Gandalf. By utilising such a technique, the filmmaker literally forced his audience to view the action from a perspective that made them see what he wanted them to see.

To make this feat even more impressive, the New Zealander managed to magically orchestrate such shots with moving cameras operated by motion control rigs. Basically, that means that the cameras would swirl and sway the actors and props around in a way that synched up the shots to deliver a size-appropriate final product.

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Senior Writer

Once described as the Swiss Army Knife of WhatCulture, Andrew can usually be found writing, editing, or presenting on a wide range of topics. As a lifelong wrestling fan, horror obsessive, and comic book nerd, he's been covering those topics professionally as far back as 2010. In addition to his current WhatCulture role of Senior Content Producer, Andrew previously spent nearly a decade as Online Editor and Lead Writer for the world's longest-running genre publication, Starburst Magazine, and his work has also been featured on BBC, TechRadar, Tom's Guide, WhatToWatch, Sportkskeeda, and various other outlets, in addition to being a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic. Between his main dayjob, his role as the lead panel host of Wales Comic Con, and his gig as a pre-match host for Wrexham AFC games, Andrew has also carried out a hugely varied amount of interviews, from the likes of Robert Englund, Kane Hodder, Adrienne Barbeau, Rob Zombie, Katharine Isabelle, Leigh Whannell, Bruce Campbell, and Tony Todd, to Kevin Smith, Ron Perlman, Elijah Wood, Giancarlo Esposito, Simon Pegg, Charlie Cox, the Russo Brothers, and Brian Blessed, to Kevin Conroy, Paul Dini, Tara Strong, Will Friedle, Burt Ward, Andrea Romano, Frank Miller, and Rob Liefeld, to Bret Hart, Sting, Mick Foley, Ricky Starks, Jamie Hayer, Britt Baker, Eric Bischoff, and William Regal, to Mickey Thomas, Joey Jones, Phil Parkinson, Brian Flynn, Denis Smith, Gary Bennett, Karl Connolly, and Bryan Robson - and that's just the tip of an ever-expanding iceberg.