When filming in a traditional flat screen medium, one may use a variety of lenses to create certain dramatic effects. They can accompany these lenses with zooms and dolly moves to create the Oh-so-dramatic Zolly, where the characters world shifts around them. This video I found explains it pretty well, even though its a bit cheesy in style.
What’s covered are some classic filming techniques, but how can we translate them to the dome.
Unlike a window where you really only have one direction of z-space to sell, a dome is 360 degrees of z space. The viewer is fixed in the middle of a scene. In order for the environment to be correctly projected on a dome, we’re stuck using only one lens setting, and can’t exactly zoom, because that would actually translate into a camera move.
Everything is based upon the 3d cameras proximity and placement within a scene, and its field of view has to remain a constant. The filming language we’ve grown to accept without realizing is subtle, and full of nuance. The dome world is still building a shooting vocabulary, let alone a well developed visual language.