CS 194-26 Final Project: The Vertigo Shot & Fake Miniatures

This is the submission of Myron Liu (cs194-26-afp) for CS 194-26 Final Project.

Part 1: The Vertigo Shot Background Dolly Zoom Sequences Dolly Zoom Gifs Summary

Part 2 Background Basic Fake Minatures More Examples Stop Motion Animation Summary

Part 1: Vertigo Shot

Background

In this project, I duplicate the famous in-camera effect: the dolly zoom . It is also known as the "Vertigo" shot. Below are my examples of the dolly zoom.

Dolly Zoom Sequences

Here are photos I took of a lemon, a tomato and a banana as the focus objects. The dolly zoom effect was generated by keeping the object in place as I moved the camera backwards while zooming in on the focus object.

Lemon (Shot 1)

Lemon (Shot 2)

Lemon (Shot 3)

Lemon (Shot 4)

Lemon (Shot 5)

Lemon (Shot 6)

Lemon (Shot 7)

Lemon (Shot 8)

Tomato (Shot 1)

Tomato (Shot 2)

Tomato (Shot 3)

Tomato (Shot 4)

Tomato (Shot 5)

Tomato (Shot 6)

Tomato (Shot 7)

Banana (Shot 1)

Banana (Shot 2)

Banana (Shot 3)

Banana (Shot 4)

Banana (Shot 5)

Banana (Shot 6)

Banana (Shot 7)

Bell's and Whistles: Dolly Zoom GIFs

Here are the GIF versions of the 3 sequenced images above demonstrating the dolly zoom effect.

Banana GIF (Dolly Zoom Forward and Backward)

Tomato GIF (Dolly Zoom Forward and Backward)

Summary

I completed the project at a friend's place at night using another friend's borrowed Canon EOS 6D camera with a real zoom lens. The lighting of all the pictures was in his house and each fruit was placed in a different room in the house. The lemon was set on a book on a table in the dining room of his house. There was a slight lighting change in one of the shots due to my friend getting too close to the object and setting her shadow on it. Otherwise I think the dolly zoom worked well with the lemon. The banana was set on a wooden desk with a bear toy in a chair nearby - the difficulties in shooting the banana was that I was unable to set the camera down so had to manually walk backwards which led to a lot of lateral movement leading to the less impressive dolly zoom effect shown in the gif. The tomato was set on a stool near the opening of the house. It was difficult to keep the zoom and size of the tomato in the image exactly right - to rectify this I used the crosshairs provided by the camera to attempt to keep it relatively still in the shot. Thus the main difficulties with the dolly zoom effect were keeping the focus object of the dolly zoom still (lateral movement occurred due to not providing a constant backing - manually walking backwards led to shaking and lateral movement from myself) and keeping the object the same size in the shot (had to manually rotate the zoom on the camera).

Part 2: Fake Minatures

Background

Using basic blurring and filtering techniques, we can set a focus line (or complex object) in an image and define the size of a fake depth of field (DOF) with respect to the focus plane. By increasing the blur, the image around the focus plane can simulate a depth of field effect. Finally, once you have defined a depth of view, you can make color adjustments to make the scene look like faked minatures. This project is based on the following website link .