Name: The Real Fake Cameras Of Toy Story 4
Uploaded: 2026-02-05T17:00:02.000Z
Duration: 6 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

So there's this shot in Toy Story 4 that completely blew my mind, and

Modal verbs - B1

Well, this is what's called a split diopter shot.

A split focus diopter is a glass attachment that covers a portion of a camera lens so that you can have two focal planes in the same frame.

It's often used to simulate deep focus when you don't have the light or the equipment to achieve it.

For real, split diopter shots can be virtually seamless, like these from Star the motion picture, Mr.

Or they can be used stylistically like these from Brian De Palma's work or Tarantino's.

This is very clearly a split diopter shot.

Gabby is in focus here in the foreground, while this plate and brush are out of focus behind her.

And yet even further back, you and that plate are in focus.

Again, that's just not possible with a single lens.

This is all ridiculous because there are no lenses in Toy Story 4.

Why would the filmmakers animate a shot with an effect that would only be need real life?

I think the answer might have something to do with this man.

Patrick Lynn, director of photography on Toy Story 4, as well as Inside out, up, the Incredibles and the 2013 animated short the Blue Umbrella.

Lin has helped to bring real cameras into the computer generated world of Pixar.

On the Blue Umbrella, for example, he pioneered a camera capture technique where the movement of a camera is tracked in the same way as an actor who's doing motion capture.

The result is came that retains a human touch.

Pixar continued to use this technique on Inside out, where Lin and his colleagues contrasted the inner and outer worlds by using different kinds of camera movement.

Inside Riley's head, the camera is graceful and perfectly smooth.

Outside, you see a more shaky handheld camera, particularly as Riley grows more anxious toward the end of the movie.

Inside out was also the first Pixar film to model the look of its virtual cameras on on real lenses.

In the mind world, they use Arri Zeiss Ultra Primes, which have very little lens distortion.

And in the real world, they modeled Cooke S4 lenses which distort light, color and shape.

More significantly, Now, I say significantly, but that's in terms of lenses.

As a viewer, the difference may not be something you notice, but it will be something you feel.

That's even more true for Toy Story 4, the first film in the franchise to be composed in in a 2.39 aspect ratio.

This gave the virtual camera team the opportunity to model anamorphic lenses, which ratchet up those distortion effects and give everything a more cinematic feel.

You can see a number of those effects in this shot.

Anamorphic lenses generally have a shallower depth of field, and

they're known for how well they separate a subject from the background.

Bo Peep, right here, just pops from what's behind her.

Anamorphic lenses also produce these signature oval shapes in the bouquet of out of focus light reflections.

This anamorphic look is something the filmmakers mostly reserved for Bo Peep, who Lyn notes, embraces change.

For Woody, who is resistant to change, they chose spherical lenses.

Just look at the difference between these two close ups in the same location.

The animation for Toy Story 4 is astounding in so many ways.

The details in the toys and their surroundings, the particulates in the air that give the antique store so much texture and reality.

Jean Claude Calais, the other DP on the film in charge of lighting, calibrated every light in the carnival down to the bulb, so that they essentially had a fully functioning set of realistic lights.

And it was the same for the antique store, where the main challenge wasn't where to add lights, but

The question was, how do you use the realistic lighting of the space selectively to augment the story?

Which finally brings me back to the split diopter shot.

Though it can be hidden well, there is something essentially stylistic about a split diopter because we know how cameras see things, and

there's just a wrongness to an image with more than one focal plane.

The best uses of split diopters match this sense of uneasiness with an uneasiness in the story.

And that's why I think Patrick Lynn or director Josh Cooley or the whole team chose to use this very analog solution in this very digital movie.

Gabby is trying to manipulate Forky into giving her information.

The split diopter broadcasts that there's something bogus about her sweetness.

Animation has always drawn from the lessons of live action film, from the visual language of cinematic storytelling.

Everyone who worked on Toy Story 4 understands that the imperfections, the way a lens distorts or a camera operator shakes or a light bounces, contain their own expressive potential.

And when you combine these with the limitless world of animation, the results can be stunningly tactile.

Thank you so much for watching this one was so much fun to make.

This episode was brought to you by Squarespace.

Now, if you don't know, you can use Squarespace to make beautiful websites for anything you might need.

A personal site, a wedding website, a site for your business or portfolio, and

in just a few clicks, you can have that website up and running.

Their design team has crafted amazing templates that work on computer browsers and on mobile switching packages perfectly between the two.

You can integrate your own photos and videos with just a few clicks.

And you can even link your social account so you can auto post to Twitter and Facebook all from within Squarespace.

Head over to squarespace.com for a free trial, and

when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com nerdwriter for 10% off your first purchase.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The Real Fake Cameras Of Toy Story 4

essentially

incredible

ridiculous

technique