How Characters Are Made to Look Bigger and Smaller in Movies TV, Movies Insider, Insider

Since the invention of film, filmmakers have tried to trick viewers into believing that an actor is either shorter or taller than they really are. The most classic techniques are sticking an actor on a platform or having them interact with props built to scale. But those need to be paired with clever camera angles and visual effects. In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), director Peter Jackson employed a forced perspective so Gandalf would really look like he was interacting with a hobbit. More complex computercontrolled camera moves and bluescreen compositing helped make the shots more complex and were used further in The Two Towers (2002), The Return of the King (2003), and the Hobbit trilogy (2012 to 2014). Performance capture created even more opportunities for actors to play giants on camera in Avatar (2009) and The BFG (2016), but creating the proper sense of scale gets trickier when these characters have to interact with normalsized actors. When pla