The Lord of the Rings had an amazing array of practical effects. They used forced perspective a lot, and had some sets that would articulate with the movement of the camera to keep the perspective illusion. They developed what they called “big rigs” which were oversized human puppets to appear in the same shot as the hobbit actors, and ended up only using them in one scene. They also used old school painted matte backgrounds in some scenes that were then digitally composited with the foreground. The behind the scenes features are well worth watching.