The Filmmaker's Eye

dolly zoom shot

Also known as a “counter zoom,” “contra zoom,” “trombone shot,” “zolly,” and perhaps most famously, the “Vertigo effect” shot, the dolly zoom was introduced to the mainstream cinematic vocabulary in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), to visualize the fear of heights experienced by detective John Ferguson (James Stewart) at key moments in the story. The shot is created by using a combination of a dolly shot with a zoom shot, working in tandem so that as the camera dollies in toward a subject, the lens is zoomed out, or zoomed in if the camera dollies out. The resulting shot, when executed properly, keeps the subject’s size constant in the frame while the background perspective changes drastically, appearing to get closer or further ...