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Additionally, if you are pulling away from something less important to reveal the important subject, rather than advancing toward it, the effect is more visually exciting. The same is true if the close subject is entering the frame from the edges, rather than coming in from a far distance. If it's coming into frame from far away, one can see the subject and start to figure out what it is as it approches--removing the suspense, and eliminating the surprise. Remember the opening scene of the first "Star Wars", as the giant ship chasing the smaller one enters the frame close-aboard, right over our heads? The feeling of it's great size is enhanced by the constant surprise as it comes and comes and comes into the frame.
Motion Control Trade Secret Number Three
At risk of stating the blindlingly obvious, the whole point of this kind of photography is the motion itself. This movement will draw and manage the audience's attention, reveal things in a tantalizing manner, add some visual "eye food" to intrinsically dull stuff, and play interestingly far longer on the screen than static lock-offs, or run-of-the-mill zoom, pan and tilt shots.
Unless you've done a lot of this kind of thing, you'll have a tendancy to execute a motion control product shot as a standard three by four aspect ratio set-up with some motion added. No. Wrong. It's fundamentally different. It's better to think of it as an extremely long multiple set-up of conventional aspect ratio sub-scenes, with many smooth transition regions splicing everything together into one whole.
The motion, complicated by the closeness, causes special problems with lighting. The camera's snout is often so extremely close to the subject that the shadow from the lens starts to become a big and visible problem. Soft lighting will help some, but key lighting from far greater off-axis angles than normal is the real answer. There is a tendancy to simply light everything from above with a big diffuse tent, or butterfly, but this causes other problems.
For example, products in light-colored plastic bottles will have very bright
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