I'm new to this group but I doubt if anyone has asked this question already.
.................Last week's episode had George competing for an apartment with a survivor from the Andrea Doria. There is a scene where George is describing different humiliating events from his life and the camera does a series of dissolving lateral pans (know what I'm saying?). In the tradition of Seinfeld cops from movies like JFK, the Godfather, Marathon Man etc., this seems to be a reference to some film. Anybody know which one??????
Deep within the rhetorical morass of alt.tv.seinfeld In article [email] (Bill Donovan) wrote :
I have not seen the episode in question, so I cannot say whether the description is correct, but I can explain what a "series of dissolving lateral pans" is.
A "lateral pan" is a camera move which describes a left or right movement of the camera. The image on the screen will move in the opposite direction. So, if the camera were to do a "left lateral pan" (or just "pan left" which would be the direction given to the cameraman) the on screen image would appear to slide off the right side. The "lateral" is superfluous, as the term "pan" has implied in its definition the idea of lateral movement.
A "dissolve" would be the momentary overlapping of two images, with the first image dissolving away while the second image simultaneously appears over it.
A "series of dissolving lateral pans" would most likely be used to show a sequence of events that occurred over time, with no clear-cut definition of the amount of time passing (and since the pan provides movement across the pane of the screen, the events shown would, most likely, have their own sense of movement as well...although this is not always the case.) Such a series of shots would be appropriate to time-compress an event involving motion; a race of some sort, a ride to the airport, or something similar.
Or even a person recounting a long list of extremely bad
things that have happened to him over the course of his life??
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I'm not a cameraman so I don't know the technical jargon is. It would seem to me that there are two ways of panning: one from a fixed point, like on a tripod, where the camera rotates; the other, what I called a "lateral pan", maybe could also be called a tracking pan because the camera itself is moving parallel with the background. In the Andrea Doria episode, a series of these tracking pans dissolve from one to the other as George tells succeeding stories of his failures (sorry I have weakness for puns). The dissolves do convey passage of time.
This is an itch I can't scratch because I'm almost sure that this shooting style is borrowed from a film - I just can't place which one. Remember in the Keith Hernandez episode where Kramer was spat upon from a grassy knoll? They borrowed the same grainy 8 mm home movie style that Oliver Stone used in JFK (of course inspired by the Zapruder film). I think they were doing the same thing with this Andrea Doria sequence.