Hi forum,
After seeing a couple of films lately with what I call a 'background pulling effect', I am curious as to how this is pulled off. Let me describe the effect a little more in detail.

Say for example you have your main character standing on a sidewalk on Broadway talking in his cell phone. The shot is a Medium Close Up where the character is in focus and the background is blurred out of focus. Suddenly, he realizes something from the phone conversation, and the background suddenly also comes in focus and is 'pulled towards the character'. It looks awesome, and I am curious as to how one pulls it off.

They dolly in while zooming out doing a rack focus at the same time. A very tricky move to pull off.

Exactly. It takes a true dolly setup and very skilled hands on the zoom and focus. (You may also notice that the visual relationship between the subject and background also seems to shift.) It's one of those very tricky and time-consuming shots that (a) can be overdone by using it more than once in a feature, and (b) may be hard to justify in time and takes since it's just cinematography gymnastics and often serves little, if any, dramatic purpose. My philosophy: it may be fun, but just tell the darn story.

That shot is know as the 'Hitchcock Dolly' or sometimes the "Zolly" (zoom + dolly), it was used to great effect in Vertigo, which i believe also pioneered the move.

Unless, today you really are after some kind of Bruckheimer type drivle the move is almost useless for you. I have never seen it used effectively, other than Vertigo and one french movie called "Le Samurai" where the director had purposely stopped the zoom for a second and kept dollying, then started the zoom again, it was so disorientating, and one of the most dificult things i have ever seen done, but worked great for the emotion reponse of that scene.

Zac

I've pulled it off with my Canon ZR20. You don't even need a dolly, unless you want it very smooth. Just zoom in on the subject, physically move towards it while zooming out. I guess you could do it the opposite way as well for a slightly different effect.

It's one of those great moves that gets picked up on by everyone and overused.
It should only be used to convey absolute disorientation or severe shock. I think one of the best modern uses I remember it from was Natural Born Killers, a very disorienting movie.

Don't forget it was used in Steven Spielberg master piece - JAWS. on the beach when Brody for the first time seeing the shark attack the little boy. Really like this effect. Hitchcock really started something ingenious :)

I remember this effect working very well in Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video when the female character is suddenly shocked at what he has transformed into. Another dramatic and sudden, out of the blue, use of this move was in "AntiTrust" with Ryan Phillippe and Tim Robins. I mean you sense the tension building as he is in a no way out situation and all of the sudden, BAM! They must have had five grips stopping that rig to keep it from hitting Phillippe. It was that fast.

I always steel myself when this type of shot comes up, because I know it requires a lot of takes to get it right, and it is tedious. One night on "Scrubs" we did three of them in a row, each on different characters. It was a long night!

What makes it hard is that applying a constant zoom speed does not mean that the field of view changes in a linear fashion. It is actually exponential, and increases as you get wider on the lens. This means that the if the dolly moves at a fixed speed (or as close as you can get without motion control), the zoom must be tapered off as you get to the wide end of the lens to keep the effect linear in appearance.

I've even done them on Steadicam, which is even more of a challenge. It's really important to keep the center of the frame constant so that the effect isn't diluted by peripheral movement, which is trickier on Steadicam.

Another good example of this type of shot can be seen in 'Sex Lies and Videotape', with Laura San Giacomo on the bed.

Some people call this type of shot a 'counterpoint zoom'...same thing as described above...a classic move where the background appears to 'breathe', achieved by zooming in while dollying out or vice versa.

It's overused, but I think it's valid film language at this point , and certain scenes seem almost naked without it.

A nice one is in Lord of the rings (first one). It realy fits in there...
I don't know how they do it today, but the original invention used a dolly somehow connected with the zoom! So you would push the dolly and that would automaticaly zoom the camera!

That makes sense, I was always impressed with Hitchcock's precision doing that effect in "Vertigo" (which I understand was shot using a forced-perspective miniature on its side).

I've only done it "manually", with myself or the camera assistant working the zoom while the dolly grip pushes in/pulls out, but I have heard of more sophisticated version being done with an encoder on the dolly wheel that is electronically linked to a motor on the zoom (here's a device (http://www.scorpiohead.com/scorpiofocus.asp) that does that, see halfway down the page under "vertigo effect").

That show is great, "Scrubs." They/You (C. Papert) do some excellent tricky shooting and editing. It looks very ensemble. If it isn't I don't want to know... HAR HAR.

I've never tried that shot, however, I might involve myself and experiment.

Cheers!

I posted some time ago requesting if anyone knew of a program run from a laptop to control the zoom via LANC

What i had in mind is that once a smooth dolly shot had been practised and agreed upon, waypoint LANC settings could be established on a timeline to set the zoom factor for each, that way some sophisticated dolly perspectives could be reached either in a linear or curved fashion.


FWIW 'Goodfellows' is the slowest and most exacting ive seen in the DeNiro restaurant scene

Charles- I absolutely love Scrubs! Kudos to you, sir, on a fine show! Is it half as much fun to work on, as it is to watch?

Thanks Keith. I don't want to get too far off-subject here, but yes, it probably is at least half as much fun to work on as to watch. The cast is a lot of fun and there's quite a bit of geniune belly laughs on set that never make it on air.

I think I've seen it somewhere once where a person was walking
towards the camera and they did the effect. It looked like the
road just kept getting longer and longer and although the person
was walking they really didn't get any closer to the camera.

This left me with an immediate feeling that although the person
is moving it is never getting closer to the things the person
wants. In this case, I thought it was a brilliant way to tell something
about that person without actually saying it!

"Poltergeist" in the hallway...

I haven't seen Poltergeist... so it couldn't be that one. It was
also outdoor...

The Hitchhiker maybe?

I don't know...

Poltergeist was just another example... Its fantastic when you nail it. A friend of mine did it and it looked like his nerves twitched...

Why not just accurately gear a follow focus to a dolly wheel to make it zoom in and out in precisely at speed and in proportion to the motion?

Then the camera operator would just have to concentrate on focus and not worry about speed and distance.

Just a thought.

You can blast me for this but I actually used that shot in a wedding once and got some excellent feedback!

I did the shot on a tripod with big wheels that roll relatively smooth and then in post I slow-mo'd the video (so that it was sensual and not dramatic) and just about everyone who saw the move asked how I did it and said that they liked it.

So store that one for a rainy day and a boring wedding and have some fun shooting it.

Ben Lynn

Side note* Scrubs it great, I love the show and don't get to watch it except when I'm on the road.

Brendan:

I referenced such a setup earlier in this thread.

Ideally the camera operator doesn't even have to worry about focus, just framing--focus should hopefully be covered by a camera assistant! (not that common in the DV world, though...)

John Jay you beat me to the punch.
The scene at the Diner with Deniro and Liota in Goodfellas was the best I've see as well. Nice and slow.
The subjects remained the same size while the background exploded. (Not literaly)
Has anyone wondered if instead of a dolly in zoom out one would dolly out and zoom in?
Or has anyone seen or accomplished this effect?
Thoughts?

Play that scene from "Goodfellas" in reverse. That will demonstrate the effect.

I've seen the effect work in either direction. It all has to do with the intensity of the scene and what you want to achieve.

I just remembered another one we did on "Scrubs" first season. We were shooting a fantasy sequence that involved a firewalking gag on a bed of coals (faked for the scene, of course). The director wanted the feeling of the bed stretching out as the character became intimidated by the challenge. We enacted a dolly in/zoom out. As always, it took a while but we got it in the end. And then it got cut out of the show. Oh well.