The punch in is one of those frustrating “same but different” techniques, in relation to the zoom. If our character is in a crowd, we convey several things, either that they’re not unique, they’re one of many, or that no amount of people in the world can rid them of their isolation. It emphasizes the distance between us and them - between them and the world. The slower we zoom, the more we become aware just how far we are away from our target - both physically and situationally. Or perhaps they’ve become focused on a goal, like Jack Torrance losing his mind and thinking he needs to kill his family to “correct them.” Maybe the character is putting two and two together and their mind is coming closer to a solution or revelation. As I said earlier, this redirects and focuses our audience’s attention, but when the focus of the zoom is a character, we create a new feeling - that our character’s point of view is becoming hyper-focused. Now, zooming in and out can create very different emotions. What happens when we take our time and zoom in slowly? But the crash-zoom is a fairly unique type of zoom.

Here, the crash-zoom whiplashes the audience, just as our hero’s kick whiplashes his foe. The camera crash zooms out, whipping our view back to a wide angle, to see the kick to the face and the thwarted attacker’s painful reaction. After our main character rolls back over the table, he steps up onto the counter, then turns and kicks an attacker in the face. In C linton Jones’s short action film “ Sleeping Dogs,” we see an excellent use of a crash-zoom-out. Once we see his face, it’s like nothing else in the world matters - all our attention is focused on him. Here, we finally meet the man of much discussion - the slave master of Django’s wife. Note its use in introducing Calvin Candy in Django Unchained. It emphasizes an action, introduces an imposing character, or adds weight to a character’s mood or emotion. A great example is the crash-zoom, often used in Hong Kong action cinema, and films harkening back to it. the dolly zoom), but let’s focus on a static camera for this article.Īt its most basic, a zoom allows us to redirect and focus our audience’s attention within a single shot. You can move the camera while zooming, a notable effect being the Hitchcock shot (a.k.a.

The camera is static so there won’t be any perspective changes. The zoom, of course, requires a telescopic lens to magnify the image. We look at two: the zoom and the punch In. There are several stylistic and technological approaches to communicate information at a distance.

Zoom film