Specialist Study 1 - Zoom Effects

Next I wanted to research and learn into zooming in and out of a picture, as pieces of animation and motion graphics that i am inspired by have this effect.

I first began by looking into The Limitless Zoom Effect

I tried to research into how this effect was created however, i was unable to find a tutorial or any information that would help me. I did find a tutorial by Andrew Kramer 

This tutorial was usefull to a point, however, when trying to recreate this myself proved a lot more difficult. I think the fact that all of the shots in the video were taken from above, and so easier to layer on top of eachother which is not what i wanted to do, i wanted to zoom into the the distance looking forward, for example, into a city in the distance. As i was struggling to find an appropriate way to create my effect i discovered the "Zoomquilt"

http://www.zoomquilt.org/

A seemingly endless picture  that appeared  to zoom  forever.

I thought that if i was able to learn this then this would be perfect. However yet again, no tutorials.

I began doing my own research in my RVJ on how to recreate this effect.

I then preceded in creating my own version, however it was not a success as and when zooming into the image the picture always became distorted and blurred :( 

I then proceeded to ask for some help from my tutors and fellow students on how to recreate the effect, one of the solutions was this.

 This zoom i found to be quite simple, you simple zoom into and image, then cleverly transition it into another image (in this case a close up version of the picture) usually by using a blur effect.

Another version of this effect which i particularly like is a scene from the Kung fu Panda Opening  Animation

http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/kung-fu-panda/

Where the camera zooms  into the moutains

My Attempt

This however was not the zooming that i had in mind,  this in my opinion is a kind of, "cheat" way of creating a zoom, not disputing the fact that it may still produce fantastic results. My worry was, what if i wanted to zoom in slowly, or not change the pictures when zooming. The video below is a much more appropriate version of the effect that i was trying to recreate, however i was convinced that this animation was created the same way as the old spice zoom.

On further discussions with my tutors and classmates, one of the tips i was given was never the zoom into the image by re-sizing it, but to move the camera further back and to place my images in the 3D space, this should solve my quality situation. And another tip was that i should start of with the last image, the image i wanted to zoom into, and then proceed to zoom out of the image. This would mean that the image would be of a very large size, but should ensure that it would all be of a decent quality.

My Own Test