In the books, Tolkien often mentions specific numbers of warriors/units when describing the armies. In Peter Jackson's movies, he uses dramatic camera sweeps and large overviews to show the size and power of the forces.
This page gives counts and ranges of the various army sizes in the Middle-Earth books.
I wonder, were Jackson's renderings true to the numbers that Tolkien indicated? Or did he inflate them for cinematic effect?
Edit I am specifically asking about the visuals, if the visually depicted number of soldiers match the numbers in the books. It seemed to me, when I watched the movies, that the armies had many more soldiers than what had been stated in the books. I assumed that Jackson had done this for visual effect, to make the armies look large and intimidating to a perhaps-jaded audience. But, I wanted to somehow fact-check my perception.
Regardless of what's in a script or on a storyboard, the animators had to (somehow) programmatically indicate an integer number to the renderers (even if, say, they clicked on "10-15,000"). During the creation process, they could have sat down, reviewed the film, and said "This army looks small-- bump it up a bit, it's not scary-looking."