Yep, those are puppeteers in skin-tight green bodysuits on the right.
Nowadays most “movie magic” involves taking a dude in tights hanging from a crane with a bunch of fans on his face to make his hair blow in the wind, and putting it all against a green screen. Then they use a computer to edit out the screen, the wires, the dudes with giant fans, and the fellas in the skin-tight suits, and replace it with an exciting flight through city, clouds, and countryside. But one of the most famous Hollywood special effects, used for over 60 years, doesn’t use computers or green screens at all.
Meet the dolly zoom. (Also known as the Vertigo shot)
What’s a dolly zoom?
Cameras have two different ways of getting a closer look at a subject on film: move the camera closer, or use the lens to zoom in. To execute a dolly zoom, you do both in opposite directions. Either you roll the camera dolly closer to the subject while zooming out, or roll the camera away while zooming in. Either way, the result is a distortion that is discomfitting and unnatural–the subject stays in focus while the background shifts and warps around them.
See it for yourself.
There’s something in our brain that knows the distortion is unnatural. Our discomfort makes the effect powerful. Unfortunately, when our own view of the world is distorted, we often can’t tell. And that’s where a good marketer can help.
Are you really seeing from your customer’s perspective?
Every one of our clients knows more about their craft than I could ever hope to learn. This coupled with their years of skill development is why their products or services are so extraordinary. But that unbelievable level of expertise makes it hard to imagine how the customer thinks (typically someone with little or no expertise). The expert doesn’t see things like their customer does.
If you’re selling, say, IT services, you’ve probably got enough data sheets to fill a couple of bookshelves. Any possible equipment or technological spec the customer could want is at your fingertips. You could fill a presentation deck with so many charts that even your numbers guy or gal tells you it’s a little much.
But that’s not what most folks who pay for IT services want. Most of them never want to think about their tech again, because it’s working flawlessly. This is true in a lot of industries. Nobody who recently got their basement waterproofed walks down there just to admire the cleanout plug sticking up from the floor. All they want is to be confident their basement will stay dry.
What kind of message are you sending?
Don’t get me wrong, your customers love it that you know as much as you do. And when you can talk with them in depth about their problem, that builds their confidence that 1) you know what you’re doing, and 2) you care enough about them to explain it. Just don’t forget the main thing.
What makes a dolly zoom work is the fact that the subject stays in focus. The world is distorted around them. If you speak powerfully to the truly felt needs of your customer, they’ll listen. If you speak in exhausting detail to things your customer really doesn’t care about, they won’t.
If you need any help distinguishing between those two ways of speaking, it’s pretty much our specialty. We’d love to talk more about it with you.