Camera motion

For the project that was never shot like cinema but needs to feel like it — the slow push that turns a still into a scene, the handheld breath that says someone was there holding the lens.

Open the editor Deep dive: cinema-zolly

What this group is for

A camera move is an opinion. These effects move the whole canvas — push, drift, orbit, tilt — so a static composite gains the intent of an operator who chose where to look and when.

Used together they become a language: a slow zoom under a Dutch skew under a film-gate weave reads as a single, deliberate shot rather than a stack of tricks.

The effects

Written up in full: camera-zoom — sample frame, parameter table and a downloadable project.

camera-zoom — Scales the canvas around a focal point. The patient push-in that tells the audience to lean closer — the most basic and most powerful camera verb there is.
camera-rotate — Rotates the canvas around a pivot. A slow roll for unease, a fast one for chaos — the horizon you can no longer trust.
camera-pan — Lerps the canvas offset across the segment. A clean controlled travel that reveals the frame the way a dolly would — calm, in command.
camera-wiggle — Deterministic handheld shake. The breath of a person holding the camera — documentary presence without ever losing repeatable output on re-export.
camera-orbit — Orbital translation around a centre. The subject stays put while the world arcs past it — a turntable, a circling predator.
camera-skew — Affine shear around a pivot. The Dutch-tilt instinct pushed into a slant — the frame is wrong on purpose and the viewer feels it before they name it.
screen-roll — Wrap-around canvas scroll. The image runs off one edge and back in the other — an endless belt, a desync, a vertical-hold gone willingly loose.
depth-zolly — Dolly-zoom: the focus plane holds stable while the other planes scale and drift by depth. Vertigo — the floor pulling away beneath a subject who never moves.
hallucination-zolly — A zolly with a non-linear mid-plane warp: focus stays sharp while out-of-focus planes ripple on a sine lattice. The dread of the dolly-zoom plus the wrongness of a fever.
film-gate-lock — A low-frequency projector-gate weave, slip, and flicker. The physical instability of celluloid running through a gate — a print, not a file.
snap-zolly — A stepped dolly-zoom that jumps between N scale levels then settles. Mechanical, percussive vertigo — a zoom that arrives in hard increments like a lens being racked by hand.
iris — A circular reveal or hide mask. Silent-era punctuation — the held breath at the end of a thought.
letterbox — Animated cinematic bars. The instant declaration that this is widescreen, this is a film, this matters.
keystone — Strip-based pseudo-perspective. The frame tips into depth like a projected sheet seen off-axis — a cheap, convincing 3D lean.
shutter-wipe — A directional reveal mask. The decisive sweep that moves us on — clean, architectural, no apology.
radial-wipe — An angular sector reveal. A clock hand crossing the frame — time made visible inside the cut.
overscan — CRT-style black borders. The bowed safe-area of a tube set — an instant memory of watching this on something old.
aperture-scan — A travelling visibility slit. The frame exists only inside a moving window — a searchlight, a scanner, a withheld view.
film-burn — A warm radial light leak applied source-atop. The reel catching fire at the join — an accident you keep on purpose.
echo-offset — Offset ghost copies of the canvas. Trailing doubles for speed or for haunting — the move that left a residue behind it.
canvas-blur — A two-pass separable gaussian blur over the rendered canvas. A rack-focus pull or a soft dream wash — attention removed, then restored.
light-shafts — Directional god-rays: parallel volumetric light at a chosen angle, with bright glyphs becoming light sources. Window light cutting across a dust-filled room — atmosphere with a direction.
god-rays — Radial crepuscular rays from a focal point; each pixel marches toward the focus accumulating bright samples. Sun breaking through cloud — the frame given a source and a reason to glow.

How to reach for it

Add these from the effects rail and key them across the segment so the move is timed, not constant. They are maskable, so a camera gesture can be confined to part of the frame; the depth-aware ones — depth-zolly, hallucination-zolly — want a depth pass before the planes will separate, so set your layers’ depth or supply a depth source first.