The Science of Forced Perspective at Disney Parks

Another thing that I didn’t get to in this video is the concept of apparent brightness when dealing with artificial light sources. Photons of light tend to disperse over a greater area as they move away from a light source, and apparent brightness is therefore inversely proportional to distance squared (i.e. If you have two identical lamps and you place one twice as far away as the other, then the closer one will appear 4 times brighter). This is extremely important when lighting forced perspective sets in photography and film, but it can also play a role at theme parks. For example, if a castle is supposed to appear twice as large and twice as far away, then the illuminated windows should only have 25% of their normal brightness. You can find this technique being used on the miniature Beast’s castle at night, as well as for the city lights in Peter Pan’s Flight!

so your saying my brain can perform high levels of trig by just looking at it but when it comes to a test i dont know wtf is going lol

Hey thank you for these kind words! I was the lead sculptor/designer of the Cars Land rockwork at Imagineering, I spent almost 4 years on this project, it was crazy! I spent a ton of time really working out the forced perspective and levels of detail, so it means so much to me to hear your appreciation of this! Thanks again, cheers!😄👍

My first experience with pandora was on a very foggy day. Walking through the entrance into the land those floating mountains looked massive, and the small floating one at the top looked like it was thousands of feet up. And the waterfall at the top of the fop show building looked 50 miles away. It was a great first experience for sure.

I have to agree that the rock work in Cars Land is the finest example of forced perspective of any theme park in the world. Truly amazing!

It's not Disney but I find Hogwarts at Universal to be an incredible use of forced perspective

imagine if a REALLY big bird landed on The Beast's Castle... like an eagle or a heron or something like that the illusion would be completely ruined

When I went to Disney as a kid I wanted to go explore the castle. I thought it was a real castle. I remember being so bummed out when we got close and you just walk through it and you can tell it’s fake and small

Say what you will about Beast's Castle, but I used to work at BOG and people asked how they were supposed to get up there on a daily basis

The Guardians of the Galaxy drop ride in California uses a cool physical parallax illusion as the car moves up and down relative to the screen, and the screen's camera perspective also shifts up and down as the car moves to make a good illusion of depth as if you were looking through a door into a cavernous space.

I’ve never realized how small the castles were, as someone who has never been to one of these parks.

I must say, I've only ever been to Disneyland California and California Adventure but honestly I just love the little touches they include everywhere. One of my favorite that I never noticed until the last time I went a few years ago, was the brickwork at the Train Station on Main Street. The bricks actually get smaller the higher you go. I don't know if thy had to have custom bricks made just to satisfy the illusion, but hats off to you disney. The attention to detail is insane.

This is literally the first time I’d even realized those floating Pandora structures were meant to be faraway mountains!

I just realized that the reason why I need glasses is that my eyes failed math.

If assassins creed has taught me anything it’s that those castles are checkpoints and there is definitely a hay stack near by

You neglected to mention my favorite forced perspective trick used in Pandora...the waterfalls in the border mountains. There is a set of three waterfalls, establishing three depth layers. In the "farthest" one, Disney actually swapped the water for a convincing wheel made to look like a waterfall. This allows them to slow the water, making its 10 foot descent take as long as a 50 foot drop, solidifying the illusion...until a seagul shows up looking like a pterodactyl!

The first time I saw carsland I knew I had seen the best forced perspective ever made by humans. I knew the space they were working with, I knew exactly where the structure stops. Yet to this day, I look at it during the day, and it just looks absolutely massive. I kinda wish they had done something similar with Galaxy's Edge, where you didn't have access to a large enough portion of it that they could have pulled off the same trick. That isn't to say that galaxy's edge doesn't also have some absolutely amazing forced perspective. Just that carsland still did it, by far, the best.

I love the Galaxy’s Edge forced prospective. They did an amazing job on making the spires by putting them on top of the ride buildings to make them look far away.

That tiny Be Our Guest castle is nothing compared to the beautiful one they built for the Beast ride in Tokyo

I feel like the beast castle does the opposite of what they wanted, it literally looks 5 feet tall