Depth Deception: Difference between revisions

Depth Deception is what happens when depth perception goes wrong.

 

 

A specific subtrope is [[Big Little Man]], where a character is introduced as being much bigger or smaller than they really are.

== Advertising ==

* 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.

 

 

== Anime & Manga ==

 

 

== Comic Books ==

* Blunt Trauma is attacking [[Empowered (Comic Book)|Empowered]]! No, it was just his action figure Ninjette threw into the air to train Emp.

* A [[Crowning Moment of Funny]] from the Italian comic ''[[Sturmtruppen]]'', as the sergeant is training the desert troops:

 

== Comic Strips ==

 

 

 

== Films -- Animation ==

* The whale from ''[[Finding Nemo]]''. "''I'm'' the little guy..."

 

== Films -- Live-Action ==

* Used as a gag in the movie ''[[Top Secret]]''. 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.

** In one scene, a window turns out to both be ''much'' larger and ''much'' higher up than it initially appears, which means that when Kane approaches it, he suddenly appears a lot smaller and less significant. This, of course, is used for symbolic effect.

** Also done with the fireplace in Xanadu, which is revealed to be large enough to burn whole trees when Kane goes back to it.

* There is a Olsen Twins's film where they parody this when they visit a little person house, at first when they see it and mention how little it looks, the guy with them says that the house is actually far away.

{{quote| '''Indy:''' Damn! I thought that was closer..." }}

* In ''[[Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves]]'', Azeem the Moor shows Robin the approaching riders through his telescope. Unfamiliar with this technology, Robin starts swinging his sword at the suddenly-close enemies.

{{quote| '''Azeem:''' [[What an Idiot!|How did your uneducated kind ever take Jerusalem?]]}}

* The opening hallway that leads to the edible room in ''[[Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory]]'' is far shorter than it actually appears; the hallway gets smaller and smaller to the end.

* A dramatic (and ''extremely'' suspenseful) example appears in ''[[Road to Perdition]]'': 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.

== Literature ==

* [[Edgar Allan Poe]]'s short story ''The Sphinx'' is about a man seeing a terrifying monster walking on the hill outside the cottage where he's staying. It turns out at the end that it was an insect crawling on a spider web very close to his face.

{{quote| "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."}}

* A short story about a monstrous dragon on a distant mountain. But in actuality, the dragon always ''appeared'' to be the same size no matter how far away the viewer was, so when the protagonist climbed the mountain he found the dragon to be much smaller.

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* [[Cloudcuckoolander|Dougal]] from ''[[Father Ted]]'' apparently can't tell the difference between small toy cows and real ones which are far away.

{{quote| "Now concentrate this time, Dougal. These ''(holds up model cows)'' are small, but the ones out there ''(points outside)'' are '''far away'''."}}

* ''[[Doctor Who]]''

** In a more recent episode, Donna Noble sees a wasp hovering just outside the window, only it turns out to be a huge wasp far away but approaching very fast.

* Like ''[[Top Secret]]!'' above, in ''[[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.

* Some of the [[Adult Swim]] [[Ad Bumpers]] feature "fake miniature" photography, described below in {{smallcaps|Real Life}}.

* ''[[Phoenix Nights]]'' featured bouncer Max squinting at an approaching group of dwarfs and asking the immortal question, "How far away are they?"

* On ''[[QI]]'', David Mitchell tried to get a joke on this concerning giant tortoises (no one gave them scientific names because they looked at them from the wrong angle and assumed they were normal-size tortoises). He stumbled over the delivery, as he suddenly realised "they thought they were normal tortoises, but closer" wouldn't work in reality, and got through it only with coaching from Stephen Fry -- though that was funny too.

* ''[[A Bit of Fry and Laurie]]'' has a [[Vox Pops]] segment where a man says his first impression of his wife was that she was an incredibly tiny woman, and that it wasn't until weeks later, after he'd gotten to know her, that he realized she was actually just far away.

 

 

* The third chapter of ''[[Tales of Monkey Island]]'' uses this trope to reveal the true size of {{spoiler|La Esponja Grande}}.

* You will never look at [http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=6756117 this] [[Pokémon]] the same way.

* ''Equinox'' embodies this trope. Items are the same size regardless of their distance from the camera, meaning it is often impossible to tell where objects are except by trial and error. What appears to be a tower made of discs might actually be a staircase.

 

 

== Web Comics ==

* [http://buttersafe.com/2007/07/26/depth-perception/ This] ''[[Buttersafe]]'' comic.

* Played with in [http://www.nerd-boy.net/nbbrowse.php?beg=41&end=50#48 this] ''Nerd Boy'' comic.

* Frequently used in ''[[Perry Bible Fellowship]]''.

* [http://www.dominic-deegan.com/view.php?date=2010-07-16 This strip] of ''[[Dominic Deegan]]''.

 

== Western Animation ==

** In 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 [[Memetic Mutation|immortal line]]: "And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."

** In the episode where the Simpsons act out folk tales, Homer as the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan runs towards Marge, who thinks he's just a normal-sized man until he gets near enough for her to see his true scale.

* In an episode of ''[[The Pink Panther]]'', the Panther plays a trick on his human foil (who is an astronomer this time) with a puppet show at the end of his telescope that convinces the guy he has discovered aliens on the moon.

* In the [[Donald Duck]] 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 ''[[Phineas and Ferb]]''' 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".

* In one episode of the ''[[Babar]]'' animated series, Arthur and Zephir panic when they look through a telescope and mistake the glow of a firefly for an invading alien spacecraft.

* In ''[[Korgoth of Barbaria]]'' Korgoth points to some pigeons below them when asked how to get to the floating castle. Turns out they're twenty-foot tall pigeons.

** Used in episode 14 with Moon's entrance, with shadows and a close-up obfuscating temporarily the fact that the monkey isn't quite the expected size.

** Also when Rubilax {{spoiler|is freed from the sword}} in episode 22; it isn't immediately obvious that {{spoiler|he's half Sadlygrove's height. He doesn't stay that size for long, though.}}