Trucking

The camera travels sideways on a straight line, and the scene reveals itself a slice at a time. It is the plainest way to show that a space continues past the edge of the frame.

It also flattens a scene on purpose. A sideways move past a set staged square to the lens reads as a diagram, and that formality is its own effect.

Truck is the crew word for lateral travel. Some crews say crab, some say track sideways, and all three describe the camera body moving left or right without turning.

The move runs at a constant rate over a distance long enough to pass several things. Short lateral moves are usually called slider work, and long ones are trucking.

What passes through the near frame decides how much depth the shot has. Nothing close to the lens means no parallax, and no parallax means the shot looks like a pan.

Use it to travel a wall, a shelf, a queue or a row of windows, and to reveal a long space without cutting.

Skip it when the subject moves too. A trucking shot that keeps pace with somebody walking is a tracking shot, and the two names collide constantly.

Tracking follows a moving subject and holds them steady in frame, so the camera's job is set by the subject's speed.

Trucking is a straight lateral move that happens whether anyone is moving or not. If the frame would still travel with nobody in it, it is trucking.

Wes Anderson builds long lateral moves into The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), travelling the camera sideways past sets staged square to the lens. The flatness is the point, and the move reads like a page turning.

A pan comes back instead, with the camera rotating from one place. Say the camera travels sideways on a straight line and the background slides the other way.

The second failure is an arc that curls around the subject. Name the path as straight, and say the lens keeps pointing the same direction throughout.