Despite what entertainment media may have repeatedly bludgeoned into your head, forced perspective is not just a what-could-have-been look back over the career moves, personal choices and fashion faux pas of a fallen from grace Hollywood star. Forced perspective is an optical illusion that is often used to create visual effects in movies, saving time in constructing large scale sets that would use more expensive materials. It is not a concept unique to filmmaking, having long been seen in various forms of art and architecture dating back centuries. Forced perception uses carefully calculated scaled objects positioned according to the viewer’s vantage point in order to manipulate visual perception and achieve a misrepresentation of an object’s relative size, length and or width. The Potemkin Stairs in Odessa, Ukraine, famously captured in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin, use a form of forced perspective in order to appear significantly longer than they actually are when looking up from the bottom, but much shorter than in reality when looking down the giant staircase. This is achieved through a series of flat landings between the steps and a varying width from level to level. Modern architecture uses the concept mostly as a form of entertainment particularly in larger than life arenas such as the Las Vegas Strip or Disneyland.In film, the technique takes advantage of the camera’s 2-Dimensional vision. Quite simply, if an object is both in focus and closer to the camera, it will appear larger on the screen. Conversely, smaller objects will seem further away in the background. While forced perspective is primarily thought of as a pre-CGI visual effect, it still has practical use in today’s Hollywood. More subtle applications of the practice can help to compensate for actor height discrepancies, making Russell Crowe seem taller and more intimidating amongst Roman gladiators or Sylvester Stallone loom larger than his rumored 5’7” height. On a larger scale, the Lord of the Rings series used the first moving track to enhance forced perspective, allowing larger numbers of normal sized actors to play short-statured hobbits and dwarves throughout a more complex series of shots.