Visual Illusion Quotes

Making movies is about creating illusions, and they can be subtle illusions, but it's all a cumulative effect as you make these little tweaks. It kinda adds up to something, hopefully.

It always seems to be raining harder than it really is when you look at the weather through the window.

It's not really a shorter skirt, I just have longer legs

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets you fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet.

Even mud gives the illusion of depth.

It doesn't really exist; it's just basically lots of different stages between the two pieces, and you end up with, like, a third shape that doesn't exist but is suggested to you by the image.

There’s a massive glitter ball in my head and it has never stopped turning

Pray look better, Sir... those things yonder are no giants, but windmills.

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

It's almost like an optical illusion, 'The Hobbit.' You look at the book, and it is really thin, and you could make a relatively thin film as well. What I mean by that is that you could race through the story at the speed that Tolkien does.

Our effects were primitive. Our stars were a black cloth with holes in it and light behind.

I remember being fascinated by the graduated sizes and perspective on the sets [of Star Wars]. And how they put shorter people and kids in the uniforms and placed them in the distance to give the idea that these sets had more depth than they really did.

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon – it is the very heart of painting. Repeated experiments with adjacent colors will show that any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.

The brain "fills in" the missing information from the blind spot. Notice what you see in the location of the dot when it's in your blind spot. When the dot disappears, you do not perceive a hole of whiteness or blackness in its place; instead your brain invents a patch of the background pattern. Your brain, with no information from that particular spot in visual space, fills in with the patterns around it. You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

Black and white creates a strange dreamscape that color never can.

Painters and poets are obliged to exaggerate the proportions of their figures in order to give true perspective.

Maybe because she's smaller than me she might look taller.

Painting is a lie. It's the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.

You know why the road curves as you're driving along? It curves because if God showed us the distance from where we are to where we’re going, we’d think it was too far.

Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

I mean, I did a film, a musical of 'Scrooge', in '70, and the tricks were done by flat clothes and mirrors. I hope that the day will come when we don't have to turn up at all.

I still swing the way I used to, but when I look up the ball is going in a different direction.

I lift my arm out of the water. It's a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop.

Mountains appear more lofty the nearer they are approached, but great men resemble them not in this particular.

The film medium is some sort of magic. I think also it's a magic that every frame comes and stands still for a fraction of a second and then it darkens. A half part of the time when you see a picture you sit in complete darkness. Isn't that fascinating? That is magic.