The Dolly Zoom Effect
Cinematography is super interesting to me. I love learning about how movies are made, and why directors choose one kind of shot over another. What are they trying to say? Where do they want the audience to be looking?
I don’t remember if it was in the middle of working on the Outset Island scene or immediately after, but I was feeling some burnout and wanted to do something small and fun. I was scrolling through YouTube one Sunday morning and came across this video by Now You See It. I watched Jaws the night before and when the clip of Chief Brody on the beach came up, it clicked as something that I could do in Blender.
Move a camera? Check. Zoom a camera? Check. Do both at the same time? Check check!
How Does a Dolly Zoom Work?
Cameras measure their lenses by their “focal length”. As the focal length increases, the narrower the field of view the camera captures and the more “squished” the background appears. Telescopic lenses can change their focal length. For example, your phone camera’s zoom function. If you then move the camera at the same rate that your changing your zoom, you create an optical effect that keeps your foreground subject relatively the same while the background seems to cave in or balloon out around them, even though nothing is actually moving.
Getting Started
To make a Dolly Zoom, you need two things; a subject, and a background. I decided to use a simple image texture on a plane for the background, and a mannequin from a previous exercise that had a simple skeleton system for posing.
But why male models? I needed somebody really, really, incredibly, good looking.
From there, it was a simple matter of placing the camera facing the man and background, and then moving/zooming it so that the man stayed in the same place relative to the focal length. I scaled the camera up a lot in the viewport to make the view cone easier to see and then eyeballed the position from there. Once the first zoom level was established, I moved the camera back and zoomed in until the man was back at the same spot. Keyframed the movement as an animation and boom. Dolly Zoom!
Surprise Zoolander Reference
Zoomed Out
Zoomed In
The Fun Stuff
So I did it. I made a dolly zoom camera effect. The man stayed the same while the background warped around him. Now what? Now I got to have fun and goof around!
Dolly Zooms typically happen in scary moments of the movie, so I needed to make something scary. Blender comes with a model of a monkey head (Called ‘Suzanne’, I don’t know why) as part of its basic shapes to work off of. Frankly, it’s a pretty creepy head. Excellent start. Place Suzanne in the background, point her towards the back of the man’s head. Paint her black and give her red eyes and now you have a nightmare. Just for kicks, I also animated the man’s head to make him turn as the monkey gets “closer”, like he feels it watching him. Throw in a single point light to create shadows across the face and it came out great.
