Fat Girl Angle Shot

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

This rather-insultingly-named trope refers to a specific form of turd polishing -- specifically, the angling and manipulation of an image to make its subject look much more flattering than they really are. Its use dates back to the earliest days of photography and film, where, unlike art (which was a fictional simulacrum of reality), those media captured images as they actually were.

The name derives from a common practice where the physically unattractive (who wish to disguise certain physical attributes, like obesity) will angle their photos on social media so as to look more attractive, doctor certain features with lighting and shading to erase physical flaws, or both.

In film, it's related to Low-Angle Shot, where unimpressive traits are disguised. However, this trope is more about the deliberate concealment of negative attributes that would otherwise be completely noticeable otherwise, whereas Low-Angle Shot is about manipulating perception to make someone look more impressive for a certain media format.

Examples of Fat Girl Angle Shot include:

Straight Examples - Using In-Camera Effects Only

Advertising

  • Actual food products get a form of this treatment during an advertisement. Since the actual food items often don't look half as impressive when actually served, the items presented during a commercial are often doctored to look fresher and crisper than they do when an actual person eats the same item in reality. Such doctoring will include shooting the food in certain lighting and applying the culinary equivalent of makeup to make the food look more appealing. Ingredients -- while representative of what is actually used/sold -- are specially prepared by skilled chefs and/or "food stylists" (instead of, for instance, 16-year-old grill boys) to maximize their visual appeal. Foods, like prepared sandwiches and hamburgers, are constructed with their ingredients deliberately placed off-center so they can be seen hanging out of the side of their roll/bun, subtly suggesting much larger portions than actually exist. See this video made by McDonalds explaining exactly what goes into a food shoot.

Film

  • One of the Scary Movie films played with this trope, featuring a shot of a female ghost who was portrayed as fairly attractive....until the camera panned up to a serious case of Butter Face. Since it was impossible to use this trope in any fashion to keep her looking remotely attractive for the rest of the film, she donned a Brown Bag Mask to prevent further Fetish Retardant.

Literature

  • Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four recalls an incident where a hooker he slept with did up her face so the makeup would hide her age in certain lighting, as it was not immediately apparent until he was close up and they were about to do the deed.

Real Life

  • Outside of media, makeup is often used for this purpose to disguise or downplay physical flaws.
  • Hitler often used Low-Angle Shots to make his height more impressive on film, though it was impossible to conceal in Real Life. However, this trope was used in both photographs and film to otherwise disguise how one of his arms was prone to jittery movement, which many now believe to have been his attempt to cover up a case of Parkinson's disease.
  • Franklin Delano Roosevelt had this trope applied to his polio. He did not want attention drawn to it, and often used clever means of hiding its severity when he needed to be photographed. Most images that were sanctioned photos explicitly showed him sitting in a vehicle or in such a way the polio was not obvious if he had to stand for any reason so he looked "normal". FDR himself purposely worked to pose himself for the photos (with the cooperation of the photographers) to look as natural as possible to hide his wheelchair, leg braces, or any hint of infirmity.


Photoshopped Examples - Using "Postwork"

Anime and Manga

  • Chisame in Mahou Sensei Negima photoshops her online alter ego to look much more attractive than she does in reality, to the point that when this secret finally comes out, she outright has to confess the images were doctored to disbelieving onlookers.

Real Life

  • Before the debates in 1858 in Freeport, Illinois between senatorial candidates Stephen Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, a series of daguerreotypes (an early form of photography) drawn up for both men were doctored to make both men look more impressive, with Douglass' cheeks slimmed down to make him less stocky and Lincoln received similar treatment to make him look less gaunt.
  • A common social media practice in which filters are applied to uploaded photos of people to make them look much better than they actually are, often digitally covering up bad complexion via digital post-processing. This is far from perfect and often tends to make the faces look "low-detail", thus subverting the trope, especially when the overall effect is combined with bad lighting. They are often combined with more generic deceptive angling to conceal multiple chins and other features.
  • Invoked for official photos of Kim-il-Sung. All official North Korean photos had to be explicitly doctored to hide a very prominent neck tumor about the size of a baseball, and this trope was utilized to prevent it from being seen. This is also why all images based on those photos show him with his face and body tilted at very specific angles[1], this was the easiest position used in the official photos he took that was later doctored to hide the tumor from view.
  1. specifically looking to his right while exposing as little of his neck from the left as possible