continuous dolly transitions

[time fights crime]

Ok, so this might seem kind of obvious to some, but I've never been able to figure out how to do those continuous dolly transitions that they do so often during musical montages and such. I can't think of any specific movie or show right now, otherwise I'd link to a video of it, but it's that dolly shot that moves completely from one end of a location to another and transitions seemlessly into another dolly of another location, as if say, a family in a hospital room were right next door to a man in an office, and it was all just one continuous shot. Does that make sense?

The other transition I've been wondering about is like the ones seen here from 0:19 to 0:40. It's the one with the whoosh sound effect where it whips quickly from one shot to another in another kind of continuous way. It's also used a lot in Malcolm in the Middle and 30 Rock

I think the second one might be a bit easier to accomplish, but I've never been able to do it with any great success. Any ideas?

 

[Gohanto]

The dolly transition, if I understand it correctly, is usually just having the dolly shot end in one location as a large foreground object (person, wall, ect...) enters the frame and at the start of the next shot a different foreground object is covering the screen and as the dolly moves the new location is revealed. Another thing is to try and keep the dolly speed consistent between locations.

The whip pan transition is pretty simply to do in my experience. Just whip pan the camera at the end up a take and at the start of the next shot begin with the camera off of the actors and whip pan the shot to them (just make sure you're going in the same direction and again try to keep the same speed). The other thing to consider is that it works well in 30 Rock and Malcolm because those are both high-key lit shows, but if they had more diversity in lighting between the shots it wouldn't look as smooth.

 

[emretufekci]

We did a lot of those shots and we did all the effects in post, which was not that difficult. We would use a steadicam (as opposed to a dolly) and the operator would "dolly" out of the shot and then would match his speed on the other location.

In post we used a planar tracker to calculate the speed of the pans and built simple 2.5D objects in after effects and used the camera solution to place a dark (out of focus) wall to stitch the two scenes together.

It took us about 10 minutes per scene. We stole this from scrubs

Hope this helps.