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. One such graffiti that I found in Berlin quite a while ago. Image source: Mascha Deikova 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,...
Published By: CineD - Friday, 13 June