History Main / DepthDeception

* A CrowningMomentOfFunny from the Italian comic ''Sturmtruppen'', as the sergeant is training the desert troops:

* The trick is played on the reader in this [[http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0188.html strip]] of ''TheOrderOfTheStick''.
* [[http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20081226 This]] ''GirlGenius''.

* Played with in [[http://drmcninja.com/page.php?pageNum=19&issue=8 this]] page of ''Dr. McNinja'' where the Doc says that armoured space suits were originally created to fight space monsters observed through telescopes. Of course, it turned out that they had gotten the scale wrong, and the space monsters are actually planet sized. We pray they continue not to notice us.

* Tricks such as the one in the page image are used extensively to paint two-dimensional advertising logos onto horizontal planes such as cricket pitches, football grounds, baseball fields, etc. When viewed from the most-commonly used camera, the logos appear as they would if printed on a vertical billboard. When viewed from one of the other cameras, however, they look very weird indeed.

* Can ''TheManYourManCouldSmellLike'' take you to the freshest of distant cultures? [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8IW78vJecg ... Not quite.]]

* Tom Baker's ''DoctorWho'' explained that the [[BiggerOnTheInside TARDIS]] works by neatly subverting this trope. Two identical boxes are put side-by-side to show they're the same size. Move one farther away. Which one's bigger? Well, neither, they're still the same size. But what if you could make it so that the relative dimensions in space were actual?

[[folder:Comics]]
* In the {{Tintin}} book ''The Shooting Star'', when Tintin looks into the telescope first he sees what appears to be a GiantSpider rather than the huge blazing meteorite which was partly obscured by a spider crawling across the telescope lens.

* [[LampshadeHanging Lampshaded]] in ''MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrail'' when King Arthur and his men made it to Camelot. "Camelot!" "Camelot!" "It's only a model..." "Shh!"

* A dramatic (and ''extremely'' suspenseful) example appears in ''RoadToPerdition'': A young boy walks up to the front door of his home and sees Connor, the son of the mob boss who employs his father, approaching [[spoiler: having just killed the boy's mother and brother]]. Connor appears to stare directly at him through the door's window, but it turns out [[spoiler: Connor was actually looking at his own reflection.]] After the boy realizes this, he has time to hide before Connor leaves the house.

* In ''SuperMario 64'', the room where you can enter Tiny Huge Island is a t-junction with a painting at the end of each hall, all of which ''appear'' to be the same size when you first enter: the one in the center is normal-sized and non-functional, the one on the left is actually slightly ''smaller'' than usual, and the one on the right is ''gigantic''. The two paintings that actually warp Mario are also set in hallways that use forced perspective, meaning that until you start walking toward one, the images all look the same size.

* Can ''TheManYourManCouldSmellLike'' take you to the freshest of distant cultures? [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8IW78vJecg ...Not quite.]]

* ''Star Wars: [[RogueSquadron Rogue Leader]]'' plays this when inside the Death Star's reactor. The entire room is rigged to look far, far larger than it actually is through use of high-res textures, forced perspective, and slowing you down considerably. It looks amazing at first, but if you fly down toward the floor the whole illusion [[SpecialEffectsFailure falls through]] and you can see clearly that you're just moving slowly through an average-sized area.

* In ''GunnerkriggCourt'', When Coyote [[PerspectiveMagic plucks the moon from the sky]], its "apparent" size doesn't change, resulting in a miniature moon. [[spoiler:Annie then promptly [[DefaceOfTheMoon defaces]] it]].

** Another Pixar example would be the scene from ''{{Cars}}'' where Lightning McQueen is accidentally knocked out of his trailer on his way to Los Angeles, CA, and in the distance he can see a truck with lights on his trailer and believing that this truck is Mack, McQueen immediately drives up to said truck only to find that the truck is actually Jerry Recycled Batteries, a disgruntled Peterbilt.

* The Moon is actually both 400 times smaller than the Sun, and is 400 times farther away from the Sun. As a result, the two both appear to be the same size.

** Another Pixar example would be the scene from ''{{Cars}}'' where LightningMcQueen is accidentally knocked out of his trailer on his way to Los Angeles, CA, and in the distance he can see a truck with lights on his trailer and believing that this truck is Mack, McQueen immediately drives up to said truck only to find that the truck is actually Jerry Recycled Batteries, a disgruntled Peterbilt.

-->-- Marzipan, ''HomestarRunner''

->''Now concentrate this time, Dougal. These ''(holds up model cows)'' are small, but the ones out there ''(points outside)'' are '''far away'''.''
-->-- ''FatherTed''

Compare [[ThatsNoMoon That's No Moon]], where a large object is mistaken for an equally large but more mundane object. See also PerspectiveMagic, where this can be used to manipulate reality.

When it's used intentionally as a camera technique--one of the oldest special effects on record--it's called ForcedPerspective.

!!Examples:

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* In an episode of ''[[{{Anime/Ptitlei015gc004kw4}} Pokémon]]'', what Team Rocket thought was Ash's Pikachu wandering towards them turned out to be a gigantic robotic Pikachu that was approaching from farther away. "It's Big-achu!"

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-->'''Sergeant''': You'll have to learn how to estimate distances. You! How far is dat palm on the horizon?
-->'''Recruit''': I'd zay about a couple of meterz, Sergeant.
-->'''Sergeant''': ''Idiot!'' Appearences in the desert are deceiving! Now think: how far can be that tiny palm on the horizon?
-->'''Recruit''': ''[Pulls out a meter and measures the distance to the palm, that turns out to be inches high and just on top of the nearest dune]'' Two meters and 15 centimeters, Sergeant!


[[AC:{{Film}}]]
* Used as a gag in the movie ''TopSecret''. A ringing phone seems to be really close to the camera, until a man picks up the three-foot receiver.
** The scene evokes classic Hitchcock, who was a fan of this trope but for less comedic reasons.

* "[[IndianaJones Damn! I thought that was closer...]]" In ''Kingdom of the Crystal Skull'', Indy misjudges a heroic rope swing onto a moving jeep, missing it, before he says that line. This, his being fooled by the optical illusion in ''The Last Crusade'', and his older self being depicted with an eye patch, have led to some fans believing one of his eyes is going bad.

-->'''Azeem''':''[[WhatAnIdiot How did your uneducated kind ever take Jerusalem?]]''

* The CallOfCthulhu 2005 FanFilm used this to portray the AlienGeometries of Ry'leh. At one point, a man falls into a hole which appeared to be a protruding rock thanks to this.

* In an example never intentionally revealed to the audience, the plane at the end of ''{{Casablanca}}'' is a model, with midgets serving at the ground crew.

* In RidleyScott's ''{{Legend}}'' that's not TomCruise diving off a waterfall but a small boy doubling for him, making it look a lot higher than it really is.
** Similarly, in Scott's ''{{Alien}}'', the director used small children in spacesuits for the "Space Jockey" scene to make the monstrous set look even larger.

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* GKChesterton references the trope in the FatherBrown story "The Song of the Flying Fish": "A thing can sometimes be too close to be seen, as, for instance, a man cannot see himself. There was a man who had a fly in his eye when he looked through the telescope, and he discovered that there was a most incredible dragon in the moon."

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* A hilarious incident in ArrestedDevelopment involving some Japanese investors, as well as [[spoiler:a jet pack and a rat suit]].
* The episode of ''BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' "Fear, Itself" had Gachnar the Fear Demon...who was four inches tall.
** A similar gag was done in ''MyHero'' with the Ultronian "Grand Arbiter".
* As the quote suggest, [[{{Cloudcuckoolander}} Dougal]] from ''FatherTed'' apparently can't tell the difference between small toy cows and real ones which are far away.

* Like ''TopSecret!'' above, in ''[[ParkerLewisCantLose Parker Lewis Can't Lose]]'', a character dealing with the stresses of his job, hears the phone ringing with the phone positioned cinematically in the foreground taking up most of the shot. As he comes up to it and picks it up and we zoom out, it turns out the phone is gigantic with the receiver as long as his forearm.

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* In a ''FoxTrot'' strip, Jason makes a snow sculpture that despite being about an adult person's size, when seen from the front looks like a towering snowman giant getting ready to stomp. Jason remarks that "Forced Perspective [see above] is an underrated art form."

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[[AC:{{Webcomics}}]]
* The trick is played on the reader in this ''OrderOfTheStick'' [[http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0188.html strip]].

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[[AC: WesternAnimation]]
* In ''TheSimpsons'' episode "Deep Space Homer", reporter Kent Brockman makes TV contact with a space mission just in the moment an ant set loose in the spaceship floats by the camera lens. Brockman's reporting jumps to the conclusion that a master race of giant ants has conquered the spacecraft and is about to invade Earth. He then pauses, looks at camera, and delivers the [[MemeticMutation immortal line]]: "And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."

-->'''Ned:''' Oh, something is definitely wrong with this hallway. ''(opens mini-door at the end of the hallway)''
-->'''Barney:''' Come on in! It's your master bedroom! ''(Ned shuts door)'' Ow! My nose!

* ''TheLittleMermaid'': Scuttle sees Ariel through a spyglass from the wrong end, and shouts to her as if she were far away, even though she is actually a few inches in front of him. When she moves the spyglass away, Scuttle exclaims, "Whoa, what a swim!"
* In BillPlympton's first feature film, ''The Tune'', as the main character approaches the town of Flooby Nooby, he notices that the trees seem to get ''smaller'' as he approaches them. The mayor explains that perspective is an illusion: things really do get bigger when one gets nearer as a defense mechanism. But at Flooby Nooby, everyone is so relaxed that the opposite is true.
* In the DonaldDuck war short "Home Defense", Donald's nephews are able to convince him that they're being attacked...by parachuting gingerbread men. Later in the short, a bee does a similar (but unintentional) dupe job.

* In the ''ReBoot'' episode where [[ChaoticEvil Hexadecimal]] gets her hands on an art program, perspective [[ItGotWorse gets worse]] the farther you go into Lost Angles. Her "cat" Scuzzy gets in on the fun by appearing normal-sized at a distance and HUGE close up; when he's frightened by the heroes he runs away to become tiny.
** Never mind when she was literally cutting and pasting things around: since it was based on the size of the windows, at least one building disappeared from one area, and reappeared ''grossly' out of proportion in another.
* In the ''PhineasAndFerb''' episode "The Ballad of Badbeard", the children leap across a perilous gorge while monsters snap at their feet. Isabella then chastises Buford for playing around with his nifty, newly-found, monster hand puppets, right in front of the 'camera'.
* This is how [[CowAndChicken Chicken]] managed to use a golf-ball and fool the Red Guy (who was at that point an astronomer), and the entire world, into believing that the earth is about to be hit by a comet, and get everyone to buy 'protection devices' which were just random junk he found around the house. When it turns out there IS a comet, it's in turn revealed to be the size of a golf-ball, and it hitting several of his 'protection devices' was enough to minimize the damage it causes.

* The whale from ''FindingNemo''. "''I'm'' the little guy..."

[[AC:RealLife]]
* Several videos seem to show ghosts or other mysterious appearances that are in reality showing a bug crawling across the screen. See http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/070621_santafe_ghost.html

* A story about [[AndretheGiant Andre the Giant]] relates how, when first entering the business in his native France, he approached the promoter's table alongside a friend of normal stature. Because of Andre's condition (whereby he was relatively in proportion, despite his size), the promoter couldn't tell how massive he was from a distance, and apparently looked at Andre's friend and said to someone sitting next to him, "We'll never hire that midget..."

* In RidleyScott's ''Legend'' that's not TomCruise diving off a waterfall but a small boy doubling for him, making it look a lot higher than it really is.

** Also in "Hurricane Neddy", when the folks want to help Ned, but destroy his house in the process.

-->'''Sergeant''': You'll have to learn to estimate distances. You! How far is that palm on the horizon?
-->'''Recruit''': I'd say about a couple of meters, Sergeant.