10 Ways Movies Blew Your Mind Without You Even Realising

5. Forced Perspective Was Used To Depict Scale - The Lord Of The Rings

Of all the effects-based challenges facing Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, one of the toughest was surely depicting the differing scales of the series' characters, namely the diminutive, four-foot Hobbits compared to everyone else, especially the towering Gandalf (Ian McKellen).

Even back in 2001, it's fair to say that most audiences simply assumed the effect was achieved entirely by shooting the actors in separate takes and then sneakily compositing them into the same shot later on, but Jackson boldly opted to go mostly practical instead.

Though body doubles were used for shots which didn't require the actors' faces, Jackson relied primarily on forced perspective techniques to achieve a believable size differential.

Jackson simply placed actors at different distances to the camera, but through strategic shot selection, this distance wasn't apparent to the audience, who would assume the two actors were simply stood or sat next to one another.

Most insanely of all, Jackson even dared to do this during moving camera shots, requiring his crew to create a motion control camera rig that would rotate props around the actors in perfect harmony with the camera movements to keep the sense of scale consistent.

Though Jackson did use clever editing and CGI for some shots, he did it the old-fashioned way wherever possible. Yet as impressive as it is, the overwhelming majority of viewers never had a clue that so much practical graft went into it.