How do you do the famous IN FOCUS/OUT OF FOCUS reveal shot?

O

onlyck

Member
Hey,

I have always wondered how to do this shot and was hoping you guys could help me with it. I've seen it so many times in horror movies. Let's say you have a guy standing in an empty room, then suddenly he goes out of focus, and the corner behind him comes into focus to reveal a masked killer with a kife behind our hero. How can this be done with the DVX? I've been using different focusing and iris adjustments but just can't get it.
 
Have your actors stand in place - focus on actor A, write down focus reading, focus on actor B, write down focus reading. Now you can rack focus from A to B all day long. The DVX however doesnt have the narrowest depth of field (like most all other 1/3" cams) so the effect isnt as noticeable as it is in 35 mm film. 35mm lens adapters solve this but there are ways to get some pretty narrow looking DOF out of the DVX. Zooming in a bit will exaggerate the effect.
 
Get far enough back (if possible) so that you can zoom all the way in with your cam. It will really help with the illusion of a shallow DOF. I was doing some stuff the other day on my hvx and was able to crawl down the individual posts of a picket fence.

Jason
 
Back away from the subject as far as you can just zoom in to where you want to creat that effect..

.....Damn Jeson u a few second faster than me
 
Something additional, if you are able to achieve the effect but it is still not enough, consider doing some post work on it...create 3 layers with masks, one layer for original video, one layer for adjusted foreground (A) blur, one layer for adjusted background blur (B) and then stick blur/defocus filter on the layers, keyframe them accordingly. (This way you can mask out what's not needing to be blurred, and feather the edges of the mask so it blends into your original footage.) Hope that wasn't too complicated :D
 
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