Forced perspective photography is pretty amazing stuff. It is done by carefully positioning objects and point of view so that they appear much larger or smaller than normal. Some forced perspective photos use intricately made props. Hours can be spent in the preparation of a single photograph. Just visit the link above to get a feel for it (“The checkerboard” and “My wife the elf” are my favorites), and then consider…
Walt Disney’s movie, Darby O’Gill & The Little People was a whole freaking movie made using forced perspective techniques. Elevated walkways, giant props, enough lights to cause a blackout in Burbank, California, and intricate camera angles produced an amazingly detailed live-action movie without a single byte of computer code.
You can watch the whole movie on YouTube, apparently but rent the DVD if you can – it’s worth seeing in full quality and you can see the Special Features on how they did it. The story in the movie is OK but the story of how Walt Disney made the movie is a technical odyssey. How they got textures, color, lighting and focus to fit so seamlessly and believably is simply mind-blowing. To say nothing of reproducing an Irish village on a sound stage. (Take that, James Cameron!)
I watched it because hunka-hunka Sean Connery
Disney’s multi-plane camera was also a technological marvel in it’s day.
~~cindy
That is so cool. Thanks for posting it! Disney was like a Thomas Edison of entertainment, just an amazing mind. He harnessed a small army of the world’s best film inventors and technicians and made it all come together.
Glad you liked it! I used to be such a Disneyphile, and every report I had to do for high school and college, when I could weave it in, would be about Walt and “the Company.” I had to purposely disengage – I was spending too much money on Disney stuff!!!
~~cindy
Delightful! Thanks for the links to the pics – I’ll need to buy the DVD of the movie someday to get the full effect of that. Awesome good fun! You have an incredible talent for finding fascinating stuff, you know that?