Dolly zoom
The dolly zoom , also known as the traveling zoom or vertigo effect , is a film effect that makes use of an optical illusion .
With the dolly zoom , the camera moves on rails ( dolly ), while the focused object remains in the image in the same size by adjusting the focal length in the opposite direction . As a result, the image section of the background is either larger (when driving in - dolly in, zoom out ) or smaller (when driving away - dolly out, zoom in ), which creates an unnatural, so-called effect. This was first used in Alfred Hitchcock's film I fight for you (1945). Far better known is the application in Hitchcock's film Vertigo (1958), where it was used to express fear of heights . The inventor of this effect is Irmin Roberts , who at the time was hired as a cameraman (picture director) for the 2nd Unit for the shooting of Vertigo .
The effect achieved is often confused, even by experts, as it initially appears contradictory. The background seems to meet the viewer when the camera moves away from the scene (see adjacent graphic). Conversely, with a dolly out, the room is stretched.
The dolly zoom cannot be created in post-production , but only live on the set with relatively great effort and has therefore been used rarely and only by very experienced directors. The difficulty is that moving the camera, changing the focal length and correcting the sharpness must result in a uniform movement for the effect to work perfectly. However, it can also arise unintentionally if, for example, a moving car is filmed in the direction of travel and a smaller image section is zoomed out at the same time. Digitally, an approximation can be achieved through gradual stretching or compression in two dimensions, but only on one level (i.e. without the shift towards the foreground or background).
Steven Spielberg used the dolly zoom in his ocean thriller Jaws . Here the protagonist's shock reaction is matched by the camera work, when the main actor Roy Scheider witnesses a shark killing a young boy. In the Spielberg production Poltergeist from 1982 a dolly zoom out is used, the result here is the impression that a corridor shown in the film would be lengthened, whereby it seamlessly ends in a tracking shot to the end of the corridor, which an actress follows, like she runs into the corridor. On the one hand, this conclusion gives the shot a special dynamic; on the other hand, it 'unmasked' the dolly zoom as a trick shot.
Other well-known examples are François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Claude Chabrol's The Unfaithful Woman (1968), the music video for Michael Jackson's song Thriller (1983) by John Landis and Paul Schrader's Mishima - A Life in Four Chapters (1985). The dolly zoom is now widespread in film productions.
proof
- ↑ Irmin Roberts in the Internet Movie Database (English)
literature
Anton Fuxjäger: Dolly ≠ Zoom, ergo Dolly-Zoom. On the technology and semantics of a special cinematic effect ( memento from September 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive )