Rings of Power Director Reveals Most Challenging Effect for the Series

The Rings of Power, like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films before it, is a series loaded with characters, extras, practical effects, visual effects, and a lot of camera tricks to make Middle-earth work. One of the key visual tricks that is employed in the show are forced perspective shots, used to illustrate the size difference between Harfoots and Strangers or Elves and Dwarves. Speaking with ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview, director Wayne Che Yip, who helmed four of the show’s eight episodes in season one, revealed that this particular camera trick was surprisingly the most difficult thing to make work when they were producing the series.

“(Forced perspective) is hands down, was the hardest thing,” the director confirmed with a laugh. “The most challenging thing in the whole show was making different actors different heights; and typically, or just Sod’s law, the actor that you needed to play the smallest character would actually be the tallest person in real life. There was a lot of planning. But one of our main goals was to try and make the experience as natural as possible for the actors. Because at the end of the day, if the performances weren’t there, it didn’t really necessarily matter whether we made someone look tall or look smaller. And so we worked very hard with the visual effects department to make sure that the actors could always, to some extent, act with each other.”

He continued, “And then, on top of that, we had the latest technology, the latest camera, visual effects technology. And we also used the most sort of rudimentary, most old school techniques as well. Nothing was off the table as long as it looked right. If it looked right in the frame, then that was what we went with. Sometimes it was motion control, sometimes it was digging a hole in the ground or having someone be on their knees.”

To top it off, Yip revealed that a recent example of a forced perspective shot in the series, Episode 5’s conversation between Nori and The Stranger was actually pulled off totally in camera without the aid of any digital tricks (pictured above). He adds, “The other times when they shared a scene together, there’d be some sort of visual effects trickery that would make Nori feel smaller than the stranger. And then that scene, at the beginning of episode five when they talk to each other, is the one time that they actually managed to share the frame together.”

New episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premiere every Friday at 12 AM ET on Amazon Prime Video. The series is only available to watch for Amazon Prime subscribers, available on a monthly or annual subscription, but you can sign up for it here.