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Topic: Zooming in movies - useless and annoying or not?
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John Anastasio
Master Film Handler
Posts: 325
From: Trenton, NJ, USA
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted 02-08-2004 07:04 AM
I forbid my production students to use a zoom unless there's a specific dramatic reason for the shot...and then they'll have to defend it. When I demonstrate the wonderful sense of depth you get from dollying a camera instead of zooming in or out, they're usually amazed. When it's used properly, a zoom can be very effective, but it's over-used and improperly used, usually just for the sake of convenience. The shaky camera technique is also annoying. It was originally designed to make it look like "actuality" style shooting, but sometimes it's so obviously faked that it's sickening. If one of my students comes in with a shakey, hand-held zoom-and-pan production,full of medium shots all done from eye level and looking like "The Blair Witch Project", I send them right back to do it all again. John Ford had a great idea....get it lit properly, lock the camera down and let the movement take place inside the frame, then edit it to make it seamless.
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Christian Appelt
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 505
From: Frankfurt, Germany
Registered: Dec 2001
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posted 02-10-2004 05:10 PM
Scott Norwood wrote:
quote:
Zooming is especially annoying in "period" films, since high quality zoom lenses are a fairly recent development. A film set in, say, the 1930s really shouldn't use zooms at all.
Kubrick did it in BARRY LYNDON, and IMHO it worked fine. But I know what you mean, and few other directors have the taste of Kubrick and the technical perfection. And he NEVER pans or tilts the camera while zooming, he goes from one perfect composition to another.
I dislike most zooming, but it can become a great storytelling tool when you really know how to use it. If you remember THE SHINING, there is a great scene in which Scatman Crothers gets a "shining" vision of the bad things happening at the Overlook hotel. Kubrick does the scene in three consecutive slow zoom shots, and it works great and looks by no means artificial.
These are zoom #1 and #2:
Zoom #3 goes from a Medium Shot to a very tight closeup of Crother's face when his expressions changes to shock (because of his vision). In three zooms Kubrick introduces the character at home, anticipates his later death by showing two altar-like picture compositions and focuses the attention on the vision when it starts. To me that's brilliant filmmaking.
Oh, and IIRC the first anmorphic zoom lens was not made by Panavision, but by a French company under the trade name "FranScope". Jan Jacobsen's UltraScope zoom was second, but it started with quite a long focal length (about 76mm, I think) while the FranScope began at 40mm wide angle. I will look it up these days.
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