cinema-zolly

The moment a character realises. Chief Brody on the beach. Henry at the diner. The frame holds them dead-still while the world behind starts to fall away.

Open the depth demo in the IDE Download .cinerune project

cinema-zolly family sample frame rendered from the depth demo — Frame from the bundled `demo.cinerune` — five depth layers driven by depth-parallax/fog (the same per-plane distribution family `cinema-zolly` uses for its zolly + zoom + fog stack).

What it’s for

Hitchcock invented it for Vertigo because no other shot could put on screen what it feels like when the floor tilts inside your head. Spielberg used it on Brody and the beach went sideways. Scorsese sat Henry Hill at a diner and let the booth around him collapse outwards. The technique is the same every time: keep the subject perfectly anchored, and let everything behind them shear in a direction it shouldn’t be able to go.

That’s what cinema-zolly bakes in. A global zoom pushes; per-plane compensation pulls back exactly on the focus depth; foreground and background drift opposite ways. The character on screen does nothing — and that stillness is the whole point. The world has just stopped making sense around them, and the camera is the one carrying the feeling.

Reach for this on: the realisation beat, the “wait, this isn’t right” pause before a reveal, the dream-logic moment in a music video, the protagonist hearing news they can’t un-hear. It’s a one-shot emotional move — use it sparingly, hold it longer than feels comfortable, and let the audience catch up to the unease.

Stack composition

This is a preset — a layered recipe, not a single effect:

depth-zolly at intensity 0.9 — the per-plane compensation, targets all layers.
camera-zoom at intensity 0.25 — global push, depth-modulated near.
depth-fog at intensity 0.35 — sinks the background, sells the depth gap.

Requires depth

The render layer needs a depth pass. Run Person extraction from the Inspector to split a clip into person/background, or import a pre-baked depth layer — without it the per-plane compensation has nothing to push against.

Key parameters (depth-zolly)

Key	Range	Default	Effect
`focusDepth`	0–1	0.3	Plane that stays anchored (0 = fg, 1 = bg)
`focusWidth`	0.02–0.6	0.2	Tolerance band around the focus plane
`zoomAmount`	0–2	0.9	Global zoom magnitude
`parallaxBias`	0–2	0.8	Cross-drift per depth plane
`subjectLock`	0–1	0.8	How hard to anchor the focus plane
`reverseBias`	-1–1	0	Sign of per-plane compensation
`breathingFreq`	0–2 Hz	0	Autonomous pulse frequency (0 = off)
`breathingAmp`	0–0.5	0	Autonomous pulse amplitude

Variations in the same collection

cinema-reverse-zolly — sign flipped. Foreground expands instead. Same dread, opposite direction — the world rushing in instead of pulling away. Try it for claustrophobia, panic attacks, the walls closing in.
cinema-breathing-zolly — non-zero breathingFreq turns the one-shot into a hypnotic loop. Good for trance sequences, hallucination passages, and anything that needs to feel like a dream the character can’t wake up from.
cinema-matrix-zolly — paired with bullet-time slit-scan. The full The Matrix “he’s the One” moment, ASCII edition.
cinema-hallucination-zolly — softer focus lock, breathing layered on. The world isn’t falling apart; it’s shimmering. Use when the character is the one questioning reality, not when reality has clearly broken.

Demo project

The downloadable demo.cinerune is the bundled Portrait / depth demo: a script-painted silhouette split across five depth-tagged render layers, each with its own depth-parallax/fog pair. Same per-plane architecture cinema-zolly is built on — open it in the editor, swap the parallax/fog stack for depth-zolly + camera-zoom + depth-fog to bake the actual preset on top of the same scaffold.