How to pan and zoom in Blender

When you’re making an animation, you actually have to “render” each frame of the film.

So for example, this little snippet ….

is actually composed of lots of images like this, all strung together and flipped through:

It’s a super nice way of getting things done, but the process of getting your computer to “render” out each of this little images is no easy feat, especially when you maybe have to render out 20,000 images; maybe the animation you’re making is 16 minutes long, so that’s 16*60 seconds total, and EACH second will customarily require 24 rendered images.

In other words, each second of film is actually 24 images being flipped through quickly to make motions seem seamless. That’s how you can quickly get to thousands and thousands of images needed for even a short film.

I had always thought that if I wanted to zoom in on, say, a girl in a blue dress, I would therefore have to render a couple hundred images of the camera getting progressively closer to the little girl.

But! it struck me that surely Blender would have an easier way of doing this, without having to render each step of the way. Yesterday, I found this tutorial, and it explained all about how to do it!

This will make a lot of things easier!