Mimicking this optical effect...

S

sbryan

Well-known member
There's an optical effect where the distance between the foreground and the background increases. Think of Henry Hill and Jimmy Conway at the last diner scene in Goodfellas.

Anyway, I want to take a real picture and do the same thing with an object that stretches into the horizon.

Is such an effect possible in AE?
 
You could definitely fake this effect in AE any number of ways but not will look real. If you're doing this for a music video or something that can look fake or stylized, you might try chroma keying your characters and setting up a 3d environment then virtually doing the equivalent of what you would do on set to acheive this effect, which I'll outline below:

The effect here dates back to Vertigo and Jaws and is called the "warp-o-cam" or "zolly" depending on if you like cool names or stupid names. What it is is a zoom out and dolly in at the same time. The zoom out expands space and makes everything smaller in frame, but the dolly in keeps the size of the foreground the same. If you use a zoom controller and time this it's not that bad to pull it off decently on set--at least it shouldn't be.

If you set up a 3D scene in after effects, though, just do the same thing...chop the set up into a bunch of layers, zoom the virtual camera out, and push it in. Then composite a 2D foreground on top of it. Or, if you have a relatively flat background just scale the background exponentially... This won't look real, though.... Best to do it on set.
 
sbryan said:
There's an optical effect where the distance between the foreground and the background increases. Think of Henry Hill and Jimmy Conway at the last diner scene in Goodfellas.

Anyway, I want to take a real picture and do the same thing with an object that stretches into the horizon.

Is such an effect possible in AE?
Click to expand...


Are you wanting to do it with a video or with a photo?

If it's with a photo, it's very easy. In Photoshop, cut out the sections you want the foreground to be and put them on a layer above the background layer. THen, using a combination of the Clone tool and Healing brush, fix some of the holes or areas that will show as the background pulls back.

If you open them both in AE, and you turn the background layer into a 3D object, you can simply have it move away from the view along the Z axis.
 
Ahhh the ole Hitchcock Vertigo shot. Dolly+Zoom to shoot that. Not sure who did this first as it's "generally" referred to as the Vertigo shot. First time I noticed it was in Jaws in a scene with Chief Brody on the beach with his wife.
 
..it compresses space basically bringing the background closer to the subject. it would be a great technique to use when say .. you wanted to have something in the background appear as if its overcoming something (such as your protagonist) in the foreground. it gives this ominous sort iof feeling like the background is a wave hurling at and about to overcome your subject.
 
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