For this project I shot two dolly zoom sequences. I wanted to incorporate juggling into my project somehow, so for the first sequence I asked a friend to be my subject and to juggle five balls as I lowered a video camera down toward her. The camera I used was a Sony Handycam DCR-TRV460. For the location I chose the lobby of the Purnell Center for the Arts on Carnegie Mellon’s campus, since this room has a high ceiling and there are balconies on the second floor from which one can lower a camera. To lower the camera, I attached the camera to a tripod, tied a rope to the bottom of the tripod, turned the tripod upside down, and oriented the camera directly downward. I tied another rope to one of the tripod’s legs and had a friend hold this rope to keep the camera and tripod from spinning, and I slowly lowered the camera and tripod with the rope over the edge of a balcony. On the ground, another friend of mine used the camera’s remote control to zoom out as I lowered camera toward the juggling subject. The video I recorded from doing this had some inevitable twisting and shaking, which I tried to alleviate with Adobe After Effects. I also used After Effects to speed up the video so that the effect would be stronger. In the final video, the dolly zoom effect is not as strong as I had hoped but it is still visible, especially if you look at the first and last frames side by side. In this shot, Julia Schwarz was the juggler, and Jonathan Ciscon and Peter Mellott helped me lower the camera and control zoom.
For the second sequence I took a digital still camera (a Nikon Coolpix L18) and took a series of pictures in a hallway on campus, each moving farther down the hallway with a different FOV. The hallway I choose was on the first floor of West Wing, a campus dorm. Making this sequence was fairly straightforward. The only difficulties I encountered were in controlling the zoom, since the camera I was using was inexpensive and did not offer a lot of control. After Effects was also used to a small extent with this sequence to keep the door at the end of the hallway centered in each frame, since I did not have a tripod and was moving the camera by hand. The final sequence, however, has a very strong effect, and only required moving the camera forward roughly 10 feet.
This sequence was shot as a video with the camera moving vertically toward the subject. A link to
the video is below. Click each image for the full size version.
Camera: Sony Handycam, DCR-TRV460
Quicktime movie of this sequence (10.7 MB)
This sequence was shot with a digital camera in the first floor of West Wing, a dorm on Carnegie Mellon’s campus. Links to the animated GIF and additional images are below.
Camera: Nikon Coolpix L18
Animated GIF of this sequence
All 10 full-size images from this sequence
David Klionsky, 1/18/2010
