'Gotcha! - looking into Forced Perception and Trompe L'oeil

Blog 6 – trompe l’oeil.

Trompe l’oeil translates from French directly to trick of the eye. It is an incredible genre of art to look into if you ever get the opportunity. In this genre, the artist challenges the viewer in what they see. It is often creating the illusion that 2-dimensional imagery exists in a 3-dimensional space. This is quite comparable to ‘ forced perspective’, which is used in photography and architecture.

Forced perspective is something commonly used in filmmaking. What immediately comes into mind is the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which there are fascinating examples of forced perspective. I have watched loads of videos of how the set designers and directors of photography approached it and they are simply fantastic!

How they filmed moving scenes with hobbits (who are to appear two to four feet tall ) and taller beings was difficult. The filmmakers did employ smaller actors or smaller stature to act as hobbits, but, not half the size of Iain McKellen.

It is easier to do a still shot: create the forced perspective set, position the camera, nobody move, and ACTION! It is even easier to just hand over the movie to the 3-D animation department and use lots of CGI. However, no movement from a character or camera would create an awfully boring scene.

Scene from the Lord of the Rings, Where we can see Frodo the hobbit is tiny in size when next to Gandalf the Wizard.

Behind the Scene from the Lord of the Rings. Where we see that there is some considerable distance between the characters to create this illusion.

To successfully maintain the forced perspective, if one character moves, the camera must move and vice versa. To achieve this the filmmakers and set designers hooked cameras and platforms to moving tracks. During a scene while the camera would move the platform was coded to move along or counter the move of the camera to maintain the illusion.

To figure out how to create the desired height difference between characters, a bit of maths was required. We can see that by positioning the hobbit character further away, we can create an illusion that the hobbit appears half the size of the human!

(Diagrams from Wired.com https://www.wired.com/2012/12/how-to-make-a-hobbit-with-forced-perspective/ )

This example of forced perspective in the Lord of the Rings was very interesting for me as it was another example of a different career path, working in Set design or movie prop making, I can take as a product designer. I had never even considered them! Something I am learning is that with this course, you really can go in any direction.

In one of our workshops, we, as groups, had a go at our own forced perspective / Trompe L’oeil. It was to be done outside close to the new city campus. We decided to incorporate the nearby bridge and make it appear one of us was dangling another student down a hole. Looking back this was quite an elaborate idea and perhaps should have kept it a little more simple!

While creating the hole we realised it was difficult to distinguish it from our designated viewpoint. We decided to evolve the hole to be a portal. The execution was not the best but it was fun trying. It was a very fun exercise to do outside in nice weather. Perhaps this exercise will go down as an example of ‘ Execute a simple idea well’ rather than fail at a fantastically complicated idea with poor implementation!