Contra-zoom: A Story Experiment
You know Jaws, right? And Goodfellas? And Vertigo? Well, this film is absolutely nothing like them. Well, besides one thing: contra-zoom. A.k.a. dolly zoom. A.k.a vertigo zoom.
My friend and I had a spare day, so we decided to take the camera out and make something on the go. Out of nowhere we decided to try and tell a story shot entirely in contra-zoom and somehow, this came together.
Given the drama of the shot, it's not exactly surprising that we opened up with a fight scene. I wanted to play with vertical lines for the opener, rather than stay stationary, and from that moment on it felt like we were trying to create some kind of Tekken.
Irmin Roberts first conceived of the shot for Hitchcock's vertigo and it's relatively easy to achieve, even on an inexpensive camera or smart phone. Just zoom in (or out) while physically moving the camera back (or forward) to keep the subject the same size. This is how the background appears to dramatically grow or shrink, depending on your direction. Seeing this perspective change, without the size of the subject being affected, is what unnerves us—our visual system processes both to gauge the relative size of objects, so seeing one change and not the other creates a kind of automatic cognitive dissonance.
The zoom on my friend's camera was a little unpredictable so not all of our attempts were successful. I also decided to try and learn animation before posting, to spectacularly cheesy affect, so forgive the unpolished attempts. One day I'll add some SFX and round this out. If you didn't manage to understand our obviously cohesive story, it turns out we wrote a piece about a couple whose date ends rather poorly due to some mysterious, badly-written note. Naturally, they full on fist fight over it.
