The actors where all adults but appeared shorter than the other people, why?
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
4 Responses:
March 7th, 2010 at 10:25 am
You should watch the features on the extended DVDs, they’re awesome and explain it all.
For one thing, all the hobbit actors had doubles. These doubles were all the appropriate height, and were used for the far away shots. For things that are more up close, say the scene where Frodo and Gandalf are having tea in Bag End and talking about the ring, Elijah Wood is standing much closer to the camera and Ian McKellan is further away. They shoot it in a special way and it appears that they were sitting right across from each other.
I’m telling you, watch those special features! They’re wonderful 
March 7th, 2010 at 10:25 am
sometimes stand ins were used that were actually midgets for scenes where the face wasn’t clearly or wasn’t seen. sometimes they would edit the actors face onto a midgets face like the scene where frodo looks back at gandalf as he falls in helms deep with the balrog. another thing they did was have people wearing these robotic suits that made them look gigantic in comparison to the people that were the hobbits. they also used a lot of optical illusions like how a table was with one part of it gigantic and one part miniscule along with all the objects on it. also, scenes were shot with the hobbits on a massive set and were edited on to film of other actors on a normal sized set (the sets had all the objects increased in size to the exact same scale) the people who worked on it put loads upon loads of time effort and money into making sure the hobbits stayed looking the same proportion of size in comparison to the other actors throughout all the movies.
March 7th, 2010 at 10:25 am
There were several techniques used.
1. Forced perspective. This involves changing the angles to make certain characters appear larger while others appear smaller. This often includes props or sets which are different scale for different characters.
Watch this video for more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDlxpnRxDJs
2. Little people doubles. When they had long shots where you see the entire Fellowship together, they had a little person for each of the Hobbits who would stand in.
Watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DahUEogCzPM&feature=related
3. In cases were Gandalf and the Hobbits were not on camera at the same time, they would film Gandalf in a smaller sized set so he appeared cramped. The Hobbits would be filmed on a full size set.
Watch this video for more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0fJUPU5xys&feature=related