What makes people appearing on T.V. look larger than they are in real life?
Camera angles, mainly.
When you look at a person in real life, your perspective is from your eyes’ level: 5-6 feet from the ground. But TV shows are shot with the camera slightly lower, about average shoulder height.
Also, if there’s a character they want to look taller, they’ll be filmed as they’re standing on platforms.
Well, if you’re talking about the phenomenon of “a camera adding 5 pounds to your weight in a photograph”, as your thread title seems to suggest, my WAG has always been that it’s because when you’re talking to a person IRL, he’s not perfectly still but is moving around, and so in your mind’s eye you get a sort of composite image of his moving face. But when a camera “freezes” that image, then he tends to look bigger (fatter) than your mind’s eye remembers him.
Yet another WAG:
I thought that it was in reference to TV cameras, and it wasn’t the actual camera that had the effect, but you looked wider on TV because of the outward curvature of the picture tube. This would have been more pronounced on older televisions, and the effect would be reduced on today’s flatter screen televisions.
Viewing distances and angle of view play a lot into it. Our eyes see with a wide angle perspective that would look distorted if we duplicated it in photographs. Photos from longer distances with narrower angles of view look more natural but faces appear “flatter,” possibly the reason for the illusion. You can observe this with your own camera. Take a close up portrat with a 35mm film camera and a “normal” 50mm lens. Take the same portrait with a lens that’s 75mm or longer at a distance from the subject so that the area of the frame is similar and compare the portraits. The wider angle of the 50mm makes close features like the nose more prominent. Not enough to be obvious but the longer lens will likely make a more flattering picture.
At least on me 10lb isn’t a significant percentage.
I went on quiz shows a couple of times and the set was really much smaller than what appeared on TV. Perhaps the same principle applies here for people. A combination of lenses and angles.
Kalista Flockhart: bit frightening when you think about it, no?
I heard it as ‘the lens adds ten pounds’. Said to placate the chubby who insist they look fat in pictures. I avoid portraiture with anything wider than a 50mm (w/35mm film) and prefer my 105mm (portrait at 10’). Wider lenses (28mm, 20mm like in National Geographic) go to the ‘funhouse effect’ quickly without practice getting the horizon line straight. Other things that add weight: makeup, lighting, costume. Oh, and daily food choices.
I always thought it was because people tend to be three dimensional when you see them in person, and look much flatter on TV, thus making one look wider.
I’m probably not wording this the best way possible, but I’m feeling a little fuzzy today, and I think you get the gist.
A TV guy here.
I suspect there are two principles conspiring together to make people look bigger on tv than in real life.
The first, and most powerful, relies on context. Put anything in a frame – without any relavant context around it – and it seems bigger. (Omni-not touched on the magical effect that framing has – tv sets can be tiny IRL, but because they are framed to only show what’s important – say, just one table in a resaurant – our brain “fills in” the thirty tables we don’t see, but which don’t really exist at all.)
Secondly, (… and this info may be old given the state of modern TV monitors…) I was taught that a TV monitor could only render something like thirty shades of a any given color. This serves to “flatten” out 3-D objects – making them look fatter.
lolagranola’s the only one who got it right: It’s a purely psychological effect, having nothing to do with camera angles or lighting, etc. You process the 2D image with 3D standards and over-emphasize the apparent width.
It’s mostly because of camera lenses. In a small studio, the cheapest way to make the show look bigger is to use a wide angle lens. I once went to audition for Jeopardy, right in the studio where they film it. Everyone was surprised how small the studio is, it looks huge on camera but is actually very small. The producers came out and explained that they use wide angle lenses to make it look bigger and more dramatic. And the same lens will make YOU look wider.
I went to the French-language equivalent of ‘Jeopardy’ (brilliantly named ‘Jeopardy’ in French, which doesn’t mean anything), as a contestant and must confess that, when I saw myself on T.V. at a later date, I thankfully didn’t notice much of a difference in my girth (definitely no Flockart, I). But, as I said previously (and as you corroborated), the set was clearly smaller than I had imagined.
That’s because the wide angle lens doesn’t distort noticably except in close ups.
It’s worst is seen when one person is closer to the camera than the other, and will look huge. Swap positions, and the other one looks huge.
Is this where they say, “I’m not a fat guy, but I play one on TV?”