Pan

A pan is the camera turning its head. It connects two things by refusing to cut between them, so the audience has to accept that both are in the same place at the same time.

It also controls when information arrives. Everything in the sweep is withheld until the turn reaches it, which makes a pan the standard way to hold a reveal for a few seconds longer than a cut would.

The camera pivots on a fixed point. The body never travels, so the near foreground and the far background swing across the frame at the same rate and no depth is revealed.

The speed of a pan has to suit the lens. A long lens magnifies the turn, so a rate that looks steady at 24mm will strobe and judder at 135mm.

Most pans are built out of three parts: a held frame at the start, the turn, and a held frame at the end. Without those two rests the move has no beginning and no destination.

Use it to link two things in one space, to follow somebody across a room, and to hold a reveal past the point where a cut would have given it away.

Do not use it to cover distance. A pan cannot get closer to anything, so a subject twenty metres away stays twenty metres away for the whole move.

A dolly travels, so near objects slide faster than far ones and the scene opens up in depth. A pan pivots, so nothing changes its relationship to anything else.

The test is parallax. Watch a foreground edge against the background. If they separate, the camera travelled and it is a dolly. If they stay locked together, it is a pan.

Alfred Hitchcock opens Rear Window (1954) with a pan across the courtyard and back into the apartment, and the whole geography of the film is established in that one turn before a word of dialogue.

The model travels instead of turning, and the foreground slides against the background. Say the camera turns on a fixed point and does not move, and ban the dolly by name.

The second failure is a pan with no ends. Give the frame it starts on and the frame it lands on, or the move drifts and stops nowhere in particular.