When it comes to bringing J.R.R. Tolkien's fantastic vision to the big screen, size matters. With the average hobbit standing three to four feet tall, dwarves coming in at four to five feet, and the varying heights of elves and humans (to say nothing of Orcs and Wargs), director Peter Jackson relied on a number of visual effects to make an authentically multicultural Middle-earth. While some characters, like the slithery Gollum, are entirely digitally created, Jackson preferred using the old-school approach known as "forced perspective," in which placement of the camera creates an illusion. This could be as simple as one character standing in the foreground to appear larger, or as complicated as the manipulation of props and sets, such as when Gandalf, played by Ian McKellen, rides in a horse-drawn cart with the hobbit Frodo. McKellen sat in a regular-sized portion of the cart; the back of the cart — where Elijah Wood sat — was inordinately large, making Wood appear smaller. Another device was to use different-sized sets, which were then merged via blue-screen technology. For the scenes in Frodo's home, McKellen filmed a scene in which he acted in a smaller version of the hobbit hole. Meanwhile, Wood acted in front of a blue screen and was digitally pasted into the shot. Additional scenes of Wood performing in a larger version of the nook were then edited in. And then there were the scale doubles: For all of the wide shots, when the hobbits appear onscreen from afar, they are actually four-feet-tall doubles, who wore masks of the actors' faces for greater verisimilitude. "We'd have to go on the set and make sure that they were doing it the way we had done the scene," Wood says. "They were cool. It was like watching real hobbits."