I think that’s how its done. The only example I can think of right now is from Fellowship of the Ring, when the camera is looking down the road as The Nazgul are Coming.
But I’ve seen it several times, especially in parodies. The effect is to create sort of a spooky, eerie feeling, like “something unsettling is happening but I’m not quite sure what.”
My questions are threefold:
Am I right that that’s how it’s done?
What exactly is happening, visually, on the screen, which signals this effect? What I mean is, what’s changing from frame to frame as this effect proceeds? Without knowing anything about camera angles and zooms and so on, what is it about the images on the screen which makes someone watching them think “something’s happening here?”
Related to question 2: How is this effect simulated in cartoons? I saw it on American Dad the other day, and they kept doing the effect for several seconds so I had a little time to try to reflect on what was happening. I scanned around quickly trying to see what was moving in relation to what, and found to my suprise that I could find no elements of the picture to be moving relative to any other elements. But… they had to be. So what was I missing? I had the distinct impression that somehow the effect was being created by just having the foreground and background elements somehow doing something different with respect to each other, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
What I’m wondering is whether anyone has a good example of it being used in the opposite of the normal fashion. That is to say that the dolly/zoom is performed with the specific intention of keeping the same amount of background in frame, and making the subject in the foreground grow or shrink into/out of dominance.
This is more generally referred to as a [post=7009871]trombone zoom[/post] or a zoom & track shot.
I’ll have to watch the movie again but I seem to recall Frankenheimer using this technique in Seconds. It’s an easy technique but has limited application in general cinematography, mostly for doing f/x work, I think.
The horror movie Uzumaki makes interesting use of the effect by doing it verrrry slooowly, back and forth, as two characters are trying to piece together what’s happening. It’s too slow to see exactly what’s happening, but it’s enough to make you feel like there’s something very wrong with the scene.
If I hadn’t seen it at high speed while rewinding, I never would have noticed what was going on.