Or a very very high zoom to get a similar effect.

No real reason for this question, just a random wonder I had. Basically the effect this would have on perspective might be interesting, and I wonder if any movie used this kind of shot for more than a couple of seconds.

  • GeorgeTheFourth@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Little gimmicky how much it’s used but the movie “Phone Booth” has tons of these shots. It’s like half the movie.

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.works
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    6 months ago

    I don’t have specific movie examples, but the narrow depth of field of a zoom lens would certainly require careful cinematographic considerations. It would be hard to compose a shot that has a typical foreground and background, without accepting that the background might be massively blurred. But I can sort-of see the appeal of having things chronically out-of-focus, as a way of hiding “obvious” details from the audience, until the focus changes and makes the big reveal.

    Maybe such a film would be trying to artistically emulate human “tunnel vision”, where depth perception is severely reduced.

  • j4k3@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I think you’d find the aberrations problematic for the speeds needed for live action. I think you’d need custom optics to get low enough f-stop and likely some very expensive custom achromatic lens stacks to correct most of the visible wavelengths.

  • SanguinePar@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Rear Window has a lot shot though a telescope, or at least it’s intended to look like that. Not sure if AH did it for real.