Or a very very high zoom to get a similar effect.
No real reason for this question, just a random wonder I had. Basically the effect this would have on perspective might be interesting, and I wonder if any movie used this kind of shot for more than a couple of seconds.
Little gimmicky how much it’s used but the movie “Phone Booth” has tons of these shots. It’s like half the movie.
I don’t have specific movie examples, but the narrow depth of field of a zoom lens would certainly require careful cinematographic considerations. It would be hard to compose a shot that has a typical foreground and background, without accepting that the background might be massively blurred. But I can sort-of see the appeal of having things chronically out-of-focus, as a way of hiding “obvious” details from the audience, until the focus changes and makes the big reveal.
Maybe such a film would be trying to artistically emulate human “tunnel vision”, where depth perception is severely reduced.
Poor Things has a bit of this, as well as a ton of other very interesting lenses.
Not sure if this is exactly what you’re looking for, but the opening scene to The Conversation uses a high-zoom shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlwdpNw1FW8
Eye in the Sky also prominently features long-distance/high magnification shots from the perspective of a drone/UAV.
This is precisely what I meant, thanks!
Rear Window?
Cosmos?
I think you’d find the aberrations problematic for the speeds needed for live action. I think you’d need custom optics to get low enough f-stop and likely some very expensive custom achromatic lens stacks to correct most of the visible wavelengths.
Rear Window has a lot shot though a telescope, or at least it’s intended to look like that. Not sure if AH did it for real.
