Bogus monster hog!
There is a story on cnn.com about “The legend of Hogzilla.” Hogzilla is a 12-foot long, 1,000 lb. wild hog with 9-inch tusks. The only evidence of this ‘record’ beast (the previous heavyweight champ from their plantation was 695 lbs.) is a photo displayed in an auto parts store by one of the two men that claim to have shot and buried it.
They didn’t bother to show anybody, didn’t butcher it for meat, and said that the head was ‘too big’ to bother mounting — that it was as big around as the tire on a compact car. Now, if I had a record animal (and I were the kind of person that liked to decorate a home with death) I think a tire sized head wouldn’t be bad. Instead, they took one picture and that was that.
So…is the picture credible? Now I don’t do a whole lot of photo editing in my day-to-day work, but I do spend all day working with precise visual detail. And, in my opinion, this picture doesn’t cut it. Take a look:
There is one version slightly edited and annotated to support my points. Look in the spots in the original version that correspond to the lettered areas to see what I’m talking about.
In my opinion, this is a fairly simple fx setup called “forced perspective”. In this example, I believe the hog to be positioned in the foreground, and the man to be in the background. Since the hog is closer to the camera, it appears larger. This is the same technique used over and over again in the “Lord of the Rings” movie to show smaller hobbits ‘next’ to larger humans.
How am I sure? Shadows. I see no evidence from the shadows that the animal and human were shot at different times and later composited. But I also don’t see the animal’s shadow on the man! The picture was taken either early-mid morning or mid-late afternoon — the shadows are pretty long. And they’re very well defined. A shows the shadow of the man’s leg at a clear angle. At B you can see the shadows of the dirt mound confirm the basic direction of the light. C is, I’m guessing, is the shadow of the backhoe / crane / whatever they are using to hoist the animal in the air. D and E are shadows on the animal itself that seem identical to the light conditions of the rest of the picture. D is the shadow behind the near leg, and E is the shadow around the curve of the snout.
If this animal were next to the man, in the position it appears to be in, the shadow would fall over the man’s right shoulder. The closer the animal is to the man, the further off to the man’s right (viewer’s left) the shadow would appear. In the modified version I have inserted a shadow at the arrow where I believe it should have appeared.
The animal is apparently a considerable distance futher foreground than the man, because the further foreground it is, the further to the man’s left (viewer’s right) the shadow would fall. And it’s not even falling across his left arm — it doesn’t fall across him at all!
Conclusion: forced perspective. The animal seems larger because it is closer to the camera.