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This will explan what forced perspective is and it is used in film today. I also do stop motion. I want to produce images that are unique as well a step above the rest. When accepting a shoot please come with an open mind. This will be going for a coffey table book latter on.




forced perspective photography in filmmakingExamples of forced perspective:

A scene in an action/adventure movie in which dinosaurs are threatening the heroes. By placing a miniature model of a dinosaur close to the camera, the dinosaur may look monstrously tall to the viewer, even though it is just closer to the camera.
Movies (especially B-movies) in the 1950s and 1960s produced on limited budgets sometimes feature forced perspective shots which are completed without the proper knowledge of the physics of light used in cinematography, so foreground models can appear blurred or incorrectly exposed.

Forced perspective can be made more believable when environmental conditions obscure the difference in perspective. For example, the final scene of the famous movie Casablanca takes place at an airport in the middle of a storm, although the entire scene was shot in a studio. This was accomplished by using a painted backdrop of an aircraft, which was "serviced" by dwarfs standing next to the backdrop. A downpour (created in-studio) draws much of the viewer's attention away from the backdrop and extras, making the simulated perspective less noticeable.

[edit] Role of lightEarly instances of forced perspective used in low-budget motion pictures showed objects that were clearly different from their surroundings: often blurred or at a different light level. The principal cause of this was geometric. Light from a point source travels in a spherical wave, decreasing in intensity (or illuminance) as the inverse square of the distance travelled. This means that a light source must be four times as bright to produce the same illuminance at an object twice as far away. Thus to create the illusion of a distant object being at the same distance as a near object and scaled accordingly, much more light is required.

Opening the camera's iris lets more light into the camera, allowing both near and far objects to be seen at a more similar light level, but this has the secondary effect of decreasing depth of field. This makes either the near or the far objects appear blurry. By increasing the volume of light hitting the distant objects, the iris opening can be restricted and depth of field is increased, thus portraying both near and far objects as in focus, and if well scaled, existing in a similar lateral plane.

Since miniature models would need to be subjected to far greater lighting than the main focus of the camera, the area of action, it is important to ensure that these can withstand the significant amount of heat generated by the incandescent light sources typically used in film and TV production.

[edit] Nodal point: forced perspective in motionPeter Jackson's film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings make extended use of forced perspective. Characters apparently standing next to each other would be displaced by several feet in depth from the camera. This, in a still shot, makes some characters appear much smaller (for the dwarves and Hobbits) in relation to others.

A new technique developed for The Fellowship of the Ring was an enhancement of this principle which could be used in moving shots. Portions of sets were mounted on movable platforms which would move precisely according to the movement of the camera, so that the optical illusion would be preserved at all times for the duration of the shot. The same techniques were used in the Harry Potter movies to make the character Hagrid look like a giant. Props around Harry and his friends are of normal size, while seemingly identical props placed around Hagrid are in fact smaller.

The techniques developed center around a nodal point axis, so the camera's panning axis is at the point between the lens and aperture ring where the light travelling through the camera meets its axis. By comparison, the normal panning axis would be at the point at which light would strike the film (or image sensor in a digital camera).

The position of this nodal point can be different for every lens. However, on wide angle lenses it is often found between the midpoint of the lens and the aperture ring.

[edit] Digital effectsAnother method is to film the actions of the "smaller" character on a set with normal-sized props, film the matching actions of the "large" character on an identical but smaller set, then combine the footage digitally. This is the most straightforward modern technique, and is most likely to be used with bluescreen filming in TV production due to its lower cost and quality requirements.

[edit] "Comedic" effects
Forced perspective of giant beer can model shown "perched" on top of a person's hand.As with many film genre and effects, forced perspective can be used to visual-comedy effect. Typically, an object or character is portrayed in a scene, its size defined by its surroundings. A character then interacts with the object or character, in the process showing that the viewer has been fooled and there is forced perspective in use.

The 1930 Laurel and Hardy movie Brats used forced perspective to depict Stan and Ollie simultaneously as adults and as their own sons.

An example used for comic effect can be found in the slapstick comedy Top Secret! in a scene which appears to begin as a close up of a ringing phone with the characters in the distance. However when the character walks up to the phone (towards the camera) and picks it up it becomes apparent that the phone is extremely oversized instead of close to the perspective of the camera. Another scene in the same movie begins with a closeup of a wristwatch. The next cut shows that the character actually has a gargantuan wristwatch.

The same technique is also used in the Dennis Waterman sketch in the British BBC sketch show Little Britain. In the television version, oversized props are used to make the caricatured Waterman look just three feet tall (or even smaller in some cases, such as in an episode in series two in which he is in a set design that is a shoebox and his size corresponds to those of the objects). In real life, Waterman is of average height, at 5'9".[1]


Use of forced perspective with the Leaning Tower of Pisa.In the Channel 4 comedy Father Ted, the idea of forced[citation needed] perspective causes confusion. Father Ted attempts to explain to Father Dougal that the small plastic cows he is holding look larger than the real cows Dougal can see in the field because the real cows are 'far away'. Father Ted is unsuccessful as Father Dougal is unable to understand the concept of perspective.

In The History of the World, Part I, while escaping the French peasants, Mel Brooks' character, Jacques, who is doubling for King Louis, runs down a hall of the palace, which turns into a ramp, showing the smaller forced perspective door at the end. As he backs down into the normal part of the room, he mutters, "Who designed this place?"

Perhaps one of the most famous usages of forced perspective involves the Leaning Tower of Pisa where a person stands in the foreground with the tower in the background and appears to be holding it up.

One of the recurring Kids in the Hall sketches featured Mr. Tyzik, "The Headcrusher", who used forced perspective (from his own point of view) to "crush" other people's heads between his fingers.

In the making of Season 5 of Red vs. Blue, the creators used forced perspective to make the character of Tucker's baby look small. In fact in the game, the alien character used as the baby is the same height as other characters.

A FoxTrot Sunday comic strip showed Jason building an adult sized snow sculpture that when seen from the front looks like a giant snowman getting ready to stomp his foot. Jason remarks that forced perspective is "an underrated art form".

[edit] Forced perspective in architecture
Forced perspective in the Roman Emperor's Aula Palatina: The windows and the coffer in the apse are smaller, and the apsis has a raised floor.
On the outside, the true size of the apsis windows is apparent.In architecture, a structure can be made to seem larger, taller, farther away or otherwise by adjusting the scale of objects in relation to the spectator, increasing or decreasing perceived depth.

For example, when forced perspective is used to make an object appear farther away, the following method can be used: By constantly decreasing the scale of objects from expectancy and convention toward the farthest point from the spectator, an illusion is created that the scale of said objects is decreasing due to their distant location. In contrast, the opposite technique was sometimes used in classical garden designs and other "follies" to shorten the perceived distances of points of interest along a path.

The Statue of Liberty is built with a slight forced perspective so that it appears more correctly proportioned when viewed from its base. When the statue was designed in the late 19th century (before easy air flight), there were few other angles from which to view the statue. This caused a difficulty for special effects technicians working on the movie Ghostbusters II, who had to back off on the amount of forced perspective used when replicating the statue for the movie so that their model (which was photographed head-on) would not look top-heavy.[2] This effect can also be seen in Michelangelo's statue of David.

Forced perspective is extensively employed at theme parks and other such (postmodern) architecture as found in Disneyland and Las Vegas, often to make structures seem larger than they are in reality where physically larger structures would not be feasible or desirable or to provide an optical illusion for entertainment value.

This will explan stop motion and it's many uses.
Stop motion (also known as stop action) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Motion animation using clay is called clay animation or clay-mation.




History
Animation of a Lego car using stop motionStop motion animation has a long history in film. It was often used to show objects moving as if by magic. The first instance of the stop motion technique can be credited to Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1897), in which a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life. In 1902, the film Fun in a Bakery Shop used the stop-trick technique in the "lightning sculpting" sequence. French trick film maestro Georges Méliès used true stop-motion to produce moving title-card letters for one of his short films, but never exploited the process for any of his other films[dubious – discuss]. The Haunted Hotel (1907) is another stop motion film by J. Stuart Blackton, and was a resounding success when released. Segundo de Chomón (1871–1929), from Spain, released El Hotel Eléctrico later that same year, and used similar techniques as the Blackton film. In 1908, A Sculptor's Welsh Rarebit Nightmare was released, as was The Sculptor's Nightmare, a film by Billy Bitzer. Italian animator Roméo Bossetti impressed audiences with his object animation tour-de-force, The Automatic Moving Company in 1912. The great European stop motion pioneer was Wladyslaw Starewicz (1892–1965), who animated The Beautiful Lukanida (1910), The Battle of the Stag Beetles (1910), The Ant and the Grasshopper (1911).

One of the earliest clay animation films was Modelling Extraordinary, which dazzled audiences in 1912. December 1916 brought the first of Willie Hopkins' 54 episodes of "Miracles in Mud" to the big screen. Also in December 1916, the first woman animator, Helena Smith Dayton, began experimenting with clay stop motion. She would release her first film in 1917, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

In the turn of the century, there was another well known animator known as Willis O' Brien (known by others as O'bie). His work on The Lost World from 1925 is known, but he is most admired[citation needed] for his work on King Kong, a milestone of his films made possible by stop motion animation.

1960s and 1970sIn the 1960s and 1970s, independent clay animator Eliot Noyes Jr. refined the technique of "free-form" clay animation with his Oscar-nominated 1965 film Clay or the Origin of Species. Noyes also used stop motion to animate sand laying on glass for his musical animated film Sandman (1975).

Sand-coated puppet animation was used in the Oscar-winning 1977 film The Sand Castle, produced by Dutch-Canadian animator Co Hoedeman. Hoedeman was one of dozens of animators sheltered by the National Film Board of Canada, a Canadian government film arts agency that had supported animators for decades. A pioneer of refined multiple stop motion films under the NFB banner was Norman McLaren, who brought in many other animators to create their own creatively controlled films. Notable among these are the pinscreen animation films of Jacques Drouin, Alexeiff Parker, and Gaston Sarault such as Mindscape (1976).

Italian stop motion films include Quaq Quao (1978), by Francesco Misseri, which was stop motion with origami, The Red and the Blue and the clay animation kittens Mio and Mao. Other European productions included a stop motion-animated series of Tove Jansson's The Moomins (from 1979, often referred to as "The Fuzzy Felt Moomins"), produced by Film Polski and Jupiter Films.

Marc Paul Chinoy directed a puppet animation feature-length film based on the famous Pogo comic strip in 1980. Titled I go Pogo, it was aired a few times on American cable channels but, has yet to be commercially released.[citation needed]

One of the main British Animation teams, John Hardwick and Bob Bura, were the main animators in many early British TV shows, and are famous for their work on the Trumptonshire trilogy.

Disney experimented with several stop motion techniques by hiring independent animator-director Mike Jittlov to do the first stop motion animation of Mickey Mouse toys ever produced for a short sequence called Mouse Mania, part of a TV special commemorating Mickey Mouse's 50th Anniversary called Mickey's 50th in 1978. Jittlov again produced some impressive multi-technique stop motion animation a year later for a 1979 Disney special promoting their release of the feature film The Black Hole. Titled Major Effects, Jittlov's work stood out as the best part of the special. Jittlov released his footage the following year to 16mm film collectors as a short film titled The Wizard of Speed and Time, along with four of his other short multi-technique animated films, most of which eventually evolved into his own feature-length film of the same title. Effectively demonstrating almost all animation techniques, as well as how he produced them, the film was released to theaters in 1987 and to video in 1989.

1980s to presentIn the 1970s and 1980s, Industrial Light & Magic often used stop motion model animation for films such as the original Star Wars trilogy: the chess sequence in Star Wars, the Tauntauns and AT-AT walkers in The Empire Strikes Back, and the AT-ST walkers in Return of the Jedi were all stop motion animation, some of it using the Go films. The many shots including the ghosts in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the first two feature films in the RoboCop series use Phil Tippett's Go Motion version of stop motion.

Stop motion was also used for some shots of the final sequence of Terminator movie, as they were for the scenes of the small alien ships in Spielberg's Batteries Not Included in 1987, animated by David W. Allen. Allen's stop motion work can also be seen in such feature films as The Crater Lake Monster (1977), Q - The Winged Serpent (1982), The Gate (1986) and Freaked (1993). Allen's King Kong Volkswagen commercial from the 1970s is now legendary among model animation enthusiasts.

Of note are the films of Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, which mix stop motion and live actors. These include Alice, an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Faust, a rendition of the legend of the German scholar. The Czech school is also illustrated by the series Pat & Mat (1979–2004). Created by Lubomír Beneš and Vladimír Jiránek, and it was wildly popular in a number of countries.

Since the general animation renaissance headlined by the likes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Little Mermaid at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, there have been an increasing number of stop motion feature films, despite advancements with computer animation. The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick and produced by Tim Burton was one of the more widely-released stop motion features. Henry Selick also went on to direct James and the Giant Peach and Coraline, and Tim Burton went on to direct Corpse Bride.

Another individual who found fame in clay animation is Nick Park, who created the characters Wallace and Gromit. In addition to a series of award-winning shorts and featurettes, he won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for the feature-length outing Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Chicken Run, his first feature-length production, grossed over $100 million at the North American box-office, and garnered critical praise. Other notable stop motion feature films released since 1990 include Fantastic Mr. Fox and $9.99, both released in 2009, and The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993). In December 2010, the NBC show Community had an entire episode in Stop-motion when character Abed wakes up to discover that everything is in stop motion animation, Professor Duncan and the study group help him try to discover the true meaning of Christmas.

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