BLOCKING: CAMERA RELATIVITY PART 1

This study will go over movement relations I learned in school in CGI to see how they can be used in film for visually interesting shots. In CGI, the camera can move in perfect synchronization with the subject in both translation and rotation.

Matching Translation

I animated an example below to have the camera match the plane’s translation speed on the Z axis, but not match the rotation.

Matching Rotation and Translation

This next example matches rotation and translation, so the plane appears to be still while the world rotates around it.

This is the same concept when a camera is mounted on the hood of a car, but the camera movement becomes uncanny when the shot is composed in a way where a mount is impossible. As shown in Zodiac:

Matching Rotation, not Translation

A camera setup that is just as uncanny is matching the subjects rotation, but freeing up the translation to move independently. In this example, I kept the camera’s transition still.

The example above is similar to the blocking of the hallway scene from Inception. The camera matches the rotation of the room, but the translation and panning of the camera are free.

I created a digital version of the camera move from above to show how the shot matches the concept. The purple plane is the floor

There are many other variations of this concept like :matching translation in the Y axis but not the X, etc. I’m excited to find new permutations of this concept!