Dolly Zoom Vertigo

I thought that I’d be experimental with this video and try to do that cool vertigo effect from Jaws. The idea is that the camera dollys in while the lens zooms out. It ends up making the background of the image appear to push away from the character in the foreground.

I knew that I wanted things to be smooth so I figured that I needed some sort of rig. I can set the camera to automatically zoom so I just needed to work on the dolly part. I thought that a heavy wagon with air filled tires would do the trick, but it didn’t.

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I’ve got an old church pew that I turned over and then strapped the camera to my ancient skateboard. This seemed to work pretty good.

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You can see on top of the camera I’ve got it recording directly to a hard drive. Then on the skateboard you can see that I have a LCD monitor so that Jenna could watch me as she moved the camera in. All in all, I think that we’ll chalk this one up to a learning experience. 😀

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