Earth Zoom

One move runs from orbit to a person on the ground, and nothing cuts. The audience is handed the whole distance rather than being told about it.

It works on scale the way a match cut works on shape. Two things that share no size at all are put in the same shot, and the shot proves they are in the same world.

The camera descends along one line from space through the atmosphere to a ground detail, passing cloud, terrain and buildings on the way. On a real production this is built from satellite data, plates and computer-generated intermediates stitched together.

The stages are the shot. Decide what the frame holds at orbit, at cloud level, at street level and at the finish, and the descent has landmarks to pass.

Speed usually eases as it goes. A descent that holds one rate all the way down feels mechanical, because the apparent motion of the ground changes as the altitude drops.

Use it to open a film, to move from a global statement to a single person, and as a title sequence that places a story on the map.

Do not use it more than once. It is a set piece, and a second one costs the same and means half as much.

An aerial push in starts in the air and stays there. It closes on a subject from a few hundred feet, and the sky never leaves the picture.

An earth zoom starts outside the atmosphere and finishes on ground detail, so the shot crosses several orders of magnitude. If the move begins with the curve of the planet in frame, it is an earth zoom.

Charles and Ray Eames laid out the idea in Powers of Ten (1977), which travels outward from a picnic in Chicago to the edge of the observable universe and back in again by powers of ten. Robert Zemeckis opens Contact (1997) with the same journey run outward from Earth, carrying decades of radio broadcasts with it as the camera retreats.

The model delivers a montage: a shot of the planet, a shot of a city, a shot of a street. Ask for one continuous descent with no cuts and no dissolves, and say so twice if the first pass cuts.

The second failure is a descent that never arrives. Name the final subject and roughly how tight the last frame is, so the move has a floor.