Zooming may have gone out of fashion, but is it coming back around? Here five DPs discuss fresh approaches to the dynamic technique.
“Zooming as a general technique is so versatile,” says DP Lorene Desportes. “A slow zoom, famously used by Kubrick for example, will work great in a horror film, whereas a Tarantino-style crash zoom will add some comedy or drama to a shot and a dolly zoom might suggest the disorientation of a character. It’s about what we, as a common unconscious, associate those movements with and if we want to perpetuate those traditions or break the rules in today’s filmmaking.”
Desportes chose to use zooms in an ad for Rosewood Hotels, shooting the whole piece on a Canon 8-64mm. “It’s a film promoting Rosewood as a lifestyle so we had to think about ways to incorporate this in the cinematography,” she explains. “It had to be elegant, yet modern and attractive to a young, international crowd with ties to the design and culture worlds. Most online content nowadays, especially commercial, is consumed in ten-second periods, so the dynamism of crash zooms helped us create that stimulating rhythm the target audience is used to.”
The zooms are intercut with wide angles that show off the architecture and interior design of the hotel. “I think this combination really helped translate both the classy decor and the trendy vibe of the hotel,” Desportes comments.
Matthias Pilz also used a Canon zoom – a vintage K35 25-120mm macro – on an upcoming BBC 2 documentary. “It’s a beautiful lens,” says the DP. “It’s a T2.8 all the way through, so it’s pretty fast for a vintage zoom. I liked it also because it has quite a long range…”
Pilz wanted the documentary, which focuses on a cult, “to create a bit of a hypnotic feel in places and to pull the audience further into the story. We used zooms in interviews, which was a challenge but also very rewarding. It’s not easy to get the timing right, without interrupting the contributors, as they were talking about very emotional topics.”
The DP discussed the interviews with director Eleanor Wood ahead of time. “Initially you feel like there’s lots of moments where you can zoom in,” Pilz continues, “but then you also realise, we need to save those zooms for the moments which are precious or which are good and which are right… I offered that [Wood] can nudge me or something, but she actually never did.” Instead the DP used his own judgement to time the zooms, while a second camera with a prime captured a fixed mid shot.
Zooms were also used for the documentary’s B-roll. “We further have a fairly abstract visual layer, with deteriorating nature, where we used the same vintage zooms and primes,” says Pilz. “We chose this way of storytelling as opposed to doing more conventional reconstructions, as we believe it works better on an emotional level with the audience.”
Artistic freedom
The feeling of being watched is what Kim Ji-yong sought when he shot the second season of South Korean Netflix hit Squid Game. Discussing the first episode, Ji-yong offers: “The main character and his gangs try to find the Suit Man, the Ddakji man [who recruits players to the game], and to enhance that feeling I used a zoom lens to have a little voyeuristic feeling.” These zooms were carefully planned with the director, and generally shot on an Angénieux Optimo 28-340mm.
Later in the season, when protagonist Gi-hun is back inside the game, the purpose of the zooms changes. “I wanted to have immediacy,” says Ji-yong. “I want the viewers to feel like they’re participating in the game… Part of it, I wanted to make it look a little bit like a reality show, but I didn’t want to go too much.” To that end he often shot handheld, close to the cast, using lightweight zooms: the Angénieux Type EZ-1 and EZ-2, and the Fujinon Cabrio 19-90mm. The timing of the zooms now needed to be felt out rather than planned. “It was really up to the operator; I operated. To be physically close to the actors and to the events, I couldn’t use multiple cameras, because I’m very close to the actors.”
Ji-yong came to Squid Game 2 from the HBO Max miniseries The Sympathizer, where he’d used zooms to complement the 1970s setting. He found he enjoyed the freedom it gave him. “I like to bring some old-fashioned techniques to modern cinema, because it feels a little newer to new generations, even to me,” the DP reflects. “I didn’t work back in the seventies. It felt new to me, and I don’t overuse it. I could use it creatively, because back then I don’t think they could be handheld and zoom. [Now] we have lighter cameras and lighter zoom lenses.”
“A subtle retro flavour” was one of Benedict Spence BSC’s reasons for zooming in another Netflix series, the psychological thriller Eric. “Being set in the eighties I thought that some slow zooms would work well within the period,” he says, “and being a mystery thriller I was also keen to build a language of clues and red herrings. I felt that using the zoom was a simple and unobtrusive way of saying to the audience, ‘This is important,’ even if it was misdirection!”
Like Ji-yong, Spence used the Fujinon Cabrio 19-90mm. “It was built as a TV-style zoom, which is why it has such a useable zoom range, but it’s fantastically well made,” Spence remarks. “Its size also means that it’s very quick to put on and off the camera, making it incredibly speedy and versatile. There is some pincushioning on verticals, but that is easily fixed in the grade. It blended in perfectly with our [Zeiss Supreme] primes.”
A tale of two halves
Helena Gonzalez shot anamorphic for the short thriller A Matter of Minutes. She mixed Panavision B- and C-series primes with the AWZ2.3 37-85mm zoom from the T series “which blended seamlessly with the primes and was ideal for shooting within the confined house setting.”
Taking place at a party, A Matter of Minutes follows teenager Ava, whose night takes a sudden life-threatening turn when her severe nut allergy is triggered. As anaphylaxis takes hold, she must fight through a sea of oblivious partygoers to reach her EpiPen in time.
“With Hannah [Beach], the director, we recognised the film’s two distinct halves – before and after the allergic reaction,” says Gonzalez. “The first half builds tension through subtle red flags, hinting at the danger ahead, with the chocolate cake serving as the central trigger. We wanted the visuals to act as a warning system, almost as if Ava’s allergy itself were trying to alert her. Dynamic zooms played a key role in this, guiding the audience’s attention – zooming in to find Ava in the crowd, emphasising crucial objects like the cake or her EpiPen, and zooming out to transition between moments. I love using zooms to reveal or conceal elements within a space, making them an effective storytelling tool beyond just speed or efficiency.”
Gonzalez believes that zooms are making a comeback. “I particularly enjoyed how they were utilised in Sick of Myself [shot by Benjamin Loeb FNF] in a smart, integrated way that enhanced the visual storytelling rather than feeling like a gimmick. That’s what I tried to do on A Matter of Minutes, to really integrate them in the visual language.”
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Words: Neil Oseman
