Talk:Dolly zoom
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is within the scope of Wikipedia:WikiProject Filmmaking, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to filmmaking. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. |
| B | This article has been rated as B-Class on the assessment scale. |
Is this the same thing as "zoom in, dolly out"? (or is that "zoom out, dolly in"?) As seen repeatedly in (ugh) Home Alone, etc.? -- DrBob
- One of those two, yes. To tell whether it's being tracked back & zoomed in or tracked forward & zoomed out, keep an eye on the background. If you end up with a wider view of the background & it looks farther away, it's been zoomed out (you've gone from telephoto to wide angle). I think that's how it's mostly done but I haven't watched any of the films specifically to find out which it is. Koyaanis Qatsi 21:02 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)
Does anyone have a set of (say) three still JPGs which demonstrate this effect? -- SGBailey
I've never heard of this as "Hitchcock zoom". To me it's always been zido, or the "Jaws shot". Outside of Vertigo, I would have thought Jaws was the most famous use of this technique. --Attila the Pooh 15:57, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- Yes, but it was first used in Vertigo, which is itself quite famous. Adopted later by many directors, both good and bad, but that's a different matter. :-) Koyaanis Qatsi
Contents |
[edit] Isn't Dolly Zoom more appropriate?
The term used for this in the film industry is dolly-zoom. I'm a cinematographer by trade and I've never heard of a Hitchcock Zoom. I believe that Hitchcock was the first to do it but I don't think that his name stayed attached to it in common language. I think this page should be moved to dolly zoom. --Plowboylifestyle 03:46, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Okay it been almost a week, I'm doing it... --Plowboylifestyle 09:30, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've known this as the "Vertigo Shot," something also used by the special effects team of The Matrix: Reloaded. Dolly zoom seems more appropriate, though, as long as "Vertigo shot" redirects here, which it did. 67.185.99.246 22:29, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Irmin Roberts, a Paramount second-unit cameraman
Can anyone verify who invented the shot? And if the dolly zoom was in fact used in Hitchcock's Spellbound?
[edit] Battlestar Galactica
Battlestar Galactica is critically acclaimed and getting very popular; I am surprised that no one has mentioned that this effect is used when a ship uses its FTL drive.
> they dropped that after the mini-series. It worked very well though
[edit] Reverse use in The Incredibles
Its nice to know some alternative names that I can use to refer to this effect. I had called it the Vertigo Effect since I heard where it first came from, a wonderful film that I have a hard time believing the people who work in movies had not studied. I first saw it used in a car commercial, where to play up the fact that the car had four doors they use this effect that seems to make the car change size.
Its remarkable when used this way, but I have just learned a new wrinkle. It can also be used effectively in reverse. I learned this week while listening to the commentary on Pixar's "The Incredibles" that the opposite move, zooming in while tracking back, was used by Brad Bird during the scene where Helen, having just learned that Bob was fired some months ago and therefore is not at the conference he said he was going to that she becomes closer to Edna, who has a way of finding him.
The idea in this shot is that he wanted to show these two characters becoming closer, so though they were across the room he used a camera technique that tended to incrementally decrease the perception of depth.
A bow of respect to Brad Bird and the camera animator at Pixar who achieved this shot with a novel inversion of the Vertigo Effect. I have never heard of this variation being used anywhere before.
Brad Bird, who went to Cal Arts with John Lasseter, explicitly credits the invention of the camera move to Hitchcock and Vertigo. Commentary for Vertigo when I first saw it on cable on American Movie Classics also claims that the camera technique originated there.
The effect can be simulated with virtual cameras in 3D animation software, and I have tried to do so since I first learned how it was done. There is a description of the technique on the Siggraph websites under www.siggraph.org/education. Where many of the same terms are attributed to it as are listed in this Wikipedia article, including Vertigo Shot.
I have never been happy with the results of my attempts to simulate it though. There always seems to be some moment where the effect stops or reverses in the middle. I have always susupected that there is some nuance in the relationship between the move and the zoom that requires some specific ratio between the effects or else that I have to fiddle with the motion curves. I begin to suspect now though that it is more a matter of practice and control.
Though the behavior of virtual cameras in 3D animation is very similar to actual cameras 3D cameras do not produce any barrel distortion. To put it another way, in virtual cameras perspective is always linear, never curvilinear. I don't believe that this has any consequences for the effect under discussion though.
-Greg Banville
[edit] Picture
Is it just me, or is that picture really annoying Gohst 01:52, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
- It's annoying. Someone should make an animated gif of the Jaws or Vertigo shot. Best examples.--Cammoore 05:09, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
