Seamless zoom out from in house to view of Earth...

N

nrwalker

New member
This effect is used a lot today. It starts with a close-up shot in a house or somewhere and then the camera slowly zooms out through walls, then through neighborhoods, then through cities, and then eventually you end up in outer space looking at the Earth. I've seen it in quite a few commercials and it is used in quite a few films. How exactly is this effect achieved ? It is done very well today. The seamlessness of the zoom outs is VERY smooth. We would like to achieve this in our new short film. Starting close up on someone and then panning out of the house and then ending up in outer space.

Can anybody give some ideas or pointers or if anybody knows exactly how this is achieved today ??

Thanks,
-Nathan
 
i would assume a lot of the stuff done in big budget movies i CG, where the house is filmed off a crane or something and then the rest is all digital .. you can do something similar I supose given images that are high res enough and you can sorta trick the viewer.. for example, if you fly through some clouds, that would be a perfect opportunity to dissolve.. motion blur (well zoom blur in this case probably) would also help with masking the "fake" nature of it
 
ok .. that was stupid - OF COURSE it's CG .. no one's flying house to outer space w/ a camera ;) i suck
 
You might want to check out Google earth. I think you can export frames of QT movies. It may not have the CG quality you would want, but if you don't have a budget for CQ maybe it would force some unexpected, creative solution.

You can zoom from space in Google to a couple hundred yards from the surface, but again maybe there's a way, given tools you will have to reinvision the way everybody else is doing this effect.

Like FiddlerMD said you could break of bits of it with a cloud transition or maybe smooth it out in AfterEffects, etc.

Just a thought, but then again I can hardly use my editing system. However, I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express lastnight. :)
 
I appreciate the input. I will look at Google Earth and maybe the best way would be to start imagery wise in outer space. Get the right resolution and look and zoom in. It seems that would be easier than going the other way. If I can get the proper imagery going into the house from outer space, I can just reverse it.

If we achieve something worthwhile, I'll post it up here. Thanks and please if anybody else has any ideas please add them. Thanks.
 
There are some tutorials online. Creative Cow I believe. The term you're after is "cosmic zoom"
 
nrwalker said:
This effect is used a lot today. It starts with a close-up shot in a house or somewhere and then the camera slowly zooms out through walls, then through neighborhoods, then through cities, and then eventually you end up in outer space looking at the Earth. I've seen it in quite a few commercials and it is used in quite a few films. How exactly is this effect achieved ? It is done very well today. The seamlessness of the zoom outs is VERY smooth. We would like to achieve this in our new short film. Starting close up on someone and then panning out of the house and then ending up in outer space.

Can anybody give some ideas or pointers or if anybody knows exactly how this is achieved today ??

Thanks,
-Nathan
Click to expand...
I once hung a camera from atop a tree and dropped it down with a wire and pully. At the end of the wire I used a bungee and cut the scene before the Cam wipped back up a foot or so. I used a couple old Hard Drives for Gyros. Rigged up enough juice from AAA rechargables to run the Drives for about 3 minutes.

It worked with some success. Im still playing with the Hard Drive Gyro concept for other things. I would love to see someone advance on this.
They are cheap and abundant. IM hoping to make a hanging rig for small Airplane shots.
 
i would use stills captured from Google maps and dissolve them into each other as you "Ken Burns effect" them (that's right I used it as a verb!!) For the first shot, it'll be your bird's eye camera of the action, then use a stock photo from Getty Images for the fictious building, then for last shot use a stock photo from Getty of the earth... i wanna try that actually... c'mon guys we're trying to help each other here!! altho that was kinda funny, ChrisLyon
 
filmguy123 said:
Pretty sure you can't use google earth images without permission (check license agreement)...
Click to expand...
Correct. In fact, you can't even have the free version of Google Earth installed on a machine at your office, even if you are only using it for personal uses...
 
If you watch the Crank video and On Demand releases, they have the zoom-out effect, and they give Getty and Google Earth a credit at the bottom, but they didn't in theatres.
 
Want to have some fun with this as well? Skydiving is always fun, bring a camera with you and reverse the footage, do the "into space" part digitally. haha.
 
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