Pass Through

The camera flies through a gap and keeps going. A doorway, a car window, a gap in a fence, and the frame is briefly filled by the edges of the opening before the far side arrives.

The tight clearance is what the audience feels. A move that could have hit something and did not reads as speed and control, even when the camera is travelling slowly.

The path is the shot. Set a start, a gap, and a destination on the far side, and the camera holds one line through all three.

The frame goes dark or narrow as the camera crosses the opening, and that moment of near blackness is what the eye reads as a threshold.

Keep the speed steady through the gap. Real rigs that do this, drones and cable cams, hold their rate because any correction near an edge is visible.

Use it to join two spaces in one take, to open a scene by arriving from outside it, and to give a move energy without adding cuts.

Skip it when the gap means nothing. A camera flying through an ordinary doorway with nothing on either side is a move for its own sake.

A through object in crosses a solid. Something has to part or dissolve for the camera to get past it.

A pass through uses an opening that is already there, so nothing gives way. If the shot needs a wall to become permeable, it is not a pass through.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Emmanuel Lubezki keep the camera moving through doorways, corridors and windows in Birdman (2014), which is cut to look like a single take. The film works because the camera goes where a person would have to stop.

The camera stops at the opening and the shot ends on the gap, because the far side was never described. Name what is on the other side.

The second failure is a gap that quietly widens so the camera has room. Say the clearance is tight, and name the edges the camera passes.