DV Filmmaking

Using a Camera Dolly

The arrival of the Steadicam on movie sets has by no means made the camera dolly obsolete. Some of independent film’s most creative directors continue to use dolly shots to achieve specific effects.

There’s a key scene in Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, when a 17-year-old high school student played by Anna Paquin glides dreamily through a nightclub on her way to seducing her awkwardly bookish English teacher, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Paquin is standing on the same dolly as the camera, which frames her from the chest up, so she maintains a fixed distance from the camera as the furniture and the people in the club move around her. She seems to float. As she moves, the ambient light on her face changes with her surroundings, highlighting the surreal motion—if she were walking, the camera wouldn’t remain at her perfect eye level through the entire shot, and the distance between her and the camera would change slightly as she took each step. Lee is a big fan of this kind of shot (he includes one in just about all of his films) and uses the actor-on-dolly technique again as the scene winds down. The next time, Hoffman stands on the dolly staring up at the camera, looking seasick and bemused as the camera moves with him away from the bathroom where he has just clumsily kissed his student. As he glides through space with the camera, Hoffman stands still, holding the same facial expression and not moving his body at all. The shot produces a similarly surreal effect as ...