The shot you include in your post is what Weta and Jackson considered the different races would look like when put together. It is the beauty shot. In that pic, proportions are what they considered they should be after their research into Tolkien. No lens/perpective distortion because the camera stands far enough from the subjects, lightrays getting onto the film can be approximated as straight and parallel, etc.
I am not an expert on Tolkien, and I don't know whether Weta/Jackson's take on the issue should be considered as accurate or not, and if you ask me, as far as the value of Tolkien's work goes, I don't give a damn about how Hobbits exactly looked like. But it is the "film-accurate" game that we are playing here, and if that is indeed the game, judging from shots like this one, there is only one conclusion I can draw out of it:
Hobbits are scaled-down humans with large feet. Nothing else. Heads are noticeably and proportionally smaller than human/elf heads.
No children with childish head proportions. If children had to be used for fleeting, trick-the-eye kind of shots, those are to be ignored when it comes to 1/6 figures, for those are to be created out of what is seen on screen during beauty shots.
Hence, Asmus' Hobbits' heads thus far are too thick no matter how much we love Asmus, how much we need those figures, how technically excellent they got, how fan-centric Asmus are proving to be, how grateful we all feel for getting these figs after decades of hopeless wait, and in spite of any subjective and emotional criteria. And Mr. Asmus' words about reconsidering proportions for future releases, are but on the right path, which I personally thank.
When people invoke mythical camera effects on pictures that are taken from a fair distance from the subject, I just don't know what they are talking about, and I can't help wondering if they do. There are things like Perspective Distortion, but we all know that only happens when the distance from the cam to the subject is small enough... right? Do you guys know that you can even take measures on pictures of a more-or-less distant subject (not actually distant, but farther away than a given threshold depending of the cam and the subject's size), and as long as you have some reference, you can compute actual measures of the depicted object, accurately?
Photographic data, if properly taken, is empirically reliable, people. It can be used in Law, Science and Engineering. If Asmus' Bilbo's head is measured to be disproportionately long on an adequately taken picture, when I have the figure in hand, I'll get almost same results. No trick, no magic, no wonder, no perceptual effect, no psychology involved. Just (almost) plain old Orthogonal Projection (yeap, even if that movie shot was taken from above head level, it is far enough for lightrays to be considered orthogonal to the projection/camera plane).
RfC
m.
The Asmus hobbits have heads that are almost the size of their bodies. Notice that the original actors heads are in proportion with their bodies (being human and all). The prototype hobbit figures definitely look to have the correct sized heads on the glamour shots but the production versions do so look larger. The size discrepancy is more noticeable when stood next to the human Asmus figures as their heads are almost matching in size.
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I think the scale of the hobbit heads is fine as is and actually wouldn't want them to be scaled down to the size of that pic. The filmmakers used a combination of green screen/scaling down, camera tricks, and the use of short stature film doubles whenever hobbits and "Big People" shared the screen, so the scaling varied from moment to moment and, if anything, the size and scale of the hobbits look a little off/shrunken (like half size adults) to me in that photo (I have the same reaction seeing that moment on film).
The hobbits' heads/faces don't seem nearly as scaled down in this shot, for example.
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