Panning in Film: What Is a Pan Shot? 10 Pan Shot Examples

Panning in film is a camera move where the camera turns left or right on a fixed point, like a person turning their head. The camera itself stays put. Only the direction it points changes.

It is one of the simplest moves in cinematography, and one of the most useful. A pan can follow a car, reveal a killer in the doorway or look away from something too awful to show. This guide covers what a pan shot is, the types of pan, how it differs from a tilt, and 10 pan shot examples that count down to Hitchcock. For the full set of camera basics, see our cinematography guide.

What is a pan shot?

A pan shot is a horizontal camera move made by rotating the camera on its base. The word comes from “panorama”, because early pans swept across a wide view.

The key detail is that the camera does not travel. If the whole camera moves sideways, that is a tracking or trucking shot. If it moves toward or away from the subject, that is a dolly. If the lens changes focal length, that is a zoom.

Move	What the camera does	Example use
Pan	Turns left or right on a fixed point	Follow a runner across a field
Tilt	Turns up or down on a fixed point	Reveal a tall building from the ground up
Tracking (trucking)	Travels sideways with the action	Walk alongside two people talking
Dolly	Travels toward or away from the subject	Push in on a face as the news lands
Zoom	Stays still and changes focal length	Snap in on a detail in a crowd

What’s the difference between a panning shot and a tracking shot? In a pan, the background slides past at the same rate as the subject. In a tracking shot, near and far objects move at different speeds, so the scene feels deeper. It is the easiest way to tell them apart on screen.

Types of pan

Most pans in film fall into one of five kinds.

• Follow pan. The camera turns to keep a moving subject in frame. The most common pan in any film.
• Reveal pan. The camera turns to show something the audience did not know was there. Horror uses it constantly.
• Pan away. The camera turns away from the action, so the audience hears what it cannot see.
• 360 degree pan. The camera turns a full circle, taking in everything around it.
• Whip pan (or swish pan). The camera turns so fast the image blurs into streaks. It often hides a cut or joins two scenes.

10 pan shot examples in film

These 10 pan shot examples count down to the pan every film student studies. Each one names the type of pan, what it does, and one thing you can steal.

10) Snake Eyes (1998)

Snake Eyes hides its cuts inside fast camera moves.

• Director: Brian De Palma
• Cinematographer: Stephen H. Burum
• Type of pan: Whip pans
• What it does: Makes a 12-minute opening look like one continuous take
• What to steal: Hide a cut in a fast move or a body crossing the lens

Nicolas Cage’s detective, Rick Santoro, works the crowd at an Atlantic City heavyweight fight as a hurricane rolls in. The camera follows him through the arena for about 12 minutes without an obvious cut.

There are cuts. Film critics have counted eight, each hidden by a fast camera move or a person crossing the frame. Whip pans do much of that work. The audience sees one unbroken night, and the film later replays it from other angles to show what the long shot missed.

9) Boogie Nights (1997)

Boogie Nights uses whip pans that feel like a glance.

• Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
• Cinematographer: Robert Elswit
• Type of pan: Motivated whip pans
• What it does: Moves the audience’s attention the way a person’s would
• What to steal: Let an actor’s head turn cue the pan

Anderson’s camera rarely whips around for style alone. A character turns their head, and the camera follows their eyes to whatever caught their attention.

That is a motivated pan. The movement has a reason inside the scene, so the audience feels it as their own curiosity rather than the director showing off. It is a good rule for any fast camera move: give it a cue in the frame.

8) Hot Fuzz (2007)

Hot Fuzz turns the whip pan into a punchline.

• Director: Edgar Wright
• Cinematographer: Jess Hall
• Type of pan: Whip pans as transitions
• What it does: Crams a whole police career into a fast opening montage
• What to steal: Use the whip pan’s speed for comedy

The opening sums up Nicholas Angel’s career in London, from training to a record number of arrests, in a burst of whip pans and snap cuts. By the time he is sent to the sleepy village of Sandford with only a peace lily for company, the film has told you exactly who he is.

Wright uses the move for rhythm as much as for story. The whips land on beats, which makes paperwork and parking tickets feel like an action film.

7) La La Land (2016)

La La Land hides two cuts in its opening number.

• Director: Damien Chazelle
• Cinematographer: Linus Sandgren, who won the Oscar for the film
• Type of pan: Whip pans that hide cuts
• What it does: Makes “Another Day of Sun” look like a single take
• What to steal: Plan your hidden cut at the fastest moment of the move

The opening dance was shot over two days in August 2015 on a closed carpool ramp of the 105 and 110 freeway interchange in Los Angeles. On screen it plays as one shot of drivers leaping out of their cars.

It is actually three shots. The two joins are hidden inside whip pans, at about three minutes and four minutes 45 seconds. At that speed, the eye cannot catch the edit, so the number keeps its sense of one breathless take.

6) Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Lawrence of Arabia follows a train off its rails.

• Director: David Lean
• Cinematographer: Freddie Young, who won the Oscar
• Type of pan: Follow pan
• What it does: Tracks the train as the ambush blows it off the track
• What to steal: Frame for where the action will end, not where it starts

The train ambush is shot wide, and the camera pans to follow the engine as the explosion derails it. It is the classic follow pan: the subject moves, and the camera turns to keep it in frame.

Focus puller Mike Fox later told the story of the take. The operator, Alex Thomson, had left the pan lock on, so there is a tiny jiggle before the camera moves. It stayed in the film, because there was only one train.

5) Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Moonrise Kingdom builds a house out of swish pans.

• Director: Wes Anderson
• Cinematographer: Robert Yeoman
• Type of pan: Swish pans at fixed marks
• What it does: Tours the Bishop family home like a dollhouse
• What to steal: Plan your pans to land on exact, square frames

The film opens inside the Bishop house, room by room. Yeoman has said they laid dolly track and he swish-panned the camera at preset marks, so each move snaps from one perfectly framed room to the next.

It is the Wes Anderson look in one sequence: flat, symmetrical frames joined by fast, precise camera moves. The film was shot on Super 16mm, which adds a grain that suits a story set in 1965. More in our guide to Wes Anderson movies every filmmaker should watch.

4) Weekend (1967)

Weekend turns the camera in circles while a pianist plays.

• Director: Jean-Luc Godard
• Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard
• Type of pan: 360 degree pan
• What it does: Circles a farmyard recital three times without a cut
• What to steal: A pan can make the audience wait, not only move

In a farmyard, a man plays Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 18 (K. 576) while farm workers drift in and out of the yard. The camera pans slowly around the yard, circling three times.

Nothing happens except the music, and that is the point. The pan puts the audience in the middle of the scene and refuses to cut away. The same film also holds one of cinema’s longest tracking shots, a traffic jam that runs about eight minutes, so it is a good film to study pan versus track side by side.

3) Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Reservoir Dogs pans away from the worst moment in the film.

• Director: Quentin Tarantino
• Cinematographer: Andrzej Sekuła
• Type of pan: Pan away
• What it does: Hides the violence and makes it worse
• What to steal: What you don’t show can hit harder than what you do

Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) dances to “Stuck in the Middle with You” and then cuts off a policeman’s ear. Just as he does, the camera pans away to an empty corner of the warehouse.

The audience hears the screaming and sees nothing. Everyone remembers the scene as brutal, but the cruelty happens off screen. The pan hands the audience’s imagination the job. Madsen’s dance, by the way, was his own idea on the day of the shoot.

2) The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly opens with a pan that ends in someone’s face.

• Director: Sergio Leone
• Cinematographer: Tonino Delli Colli
• Type of pan: Reveal pan
• What it does: Turns a wide desert into an extreme close-up in one move
• What to steal: Surprise the audience with scale

The first shot looks across empty desert. Then the camera turns, and a face slides into the frame so close that it fills it. Roger Ebert described how the shot “slides onto a sunburned, desperate face”.

It is a reveal pan with a twist. The audience thinks it is looking at a wide desert shot, and the pan turns it into a close-up. Leone uses that jump in scale all film, from mountains to eyes.

Beginners rarely get the slow pan right.

They pan too fast, and it judders. The fix is not a better tripod. It is patience.

RED’s own guide says to pan no faster than a full image width every seven seconds at 24 frames per second. That feels painfully slow behind the camera. On screen it looks smooth.

Try it once with a stopwatch. Then watch Leone’s opening again and count.

1) Rear Window (1954)

Rear Window tells you the whole setup in one move, before anyone speaks.

• Director: Alfred Hitchcock
• Cinematographer: Robert Burks, Oscar nominated for the film
• Type of pan: Pan with a boom move
• What it does: Introduces the courtyard, the neighbours and the hero’s broken leg
• What to steal: Let the camera explain the story so the dialogue doesn’t have to

The opening camera move turns across the courtyard, taking in the neighbours one window at a time, then pulls back through the window into L.B. Jefferies’ apartment. It ends on his leg cast, which reads “Here lie the broken bones of L.B. Jefferies”, then his smashed camera and a photo of the racing crash that did it.

In about 90 seconds, you know where you are, who lives across the way, what Jeff does for a living and why he is stuck in a wheelchair. The whole courtyard was built on a Paramount soundstage, with 31 apartments, 12 of them fully furnished, so Hitchcock’s camera could pan to any window.

Start your panning practice with Rear Window, not an action film.

Pause the opening every few seconds and write down what each part of the move tells you. You will end up with a page of notes from one shot.

Then plan your own version. One pan across a room that tells the audience who lives there, what they do and what just went wrong.

No dialogue allowed.

The tilt shot

A tilt shot is the pan’s vertical twin. The camera turns up or down on a fixed point instead of left or right.

A tilt up can make something feel big and powerful, like a tower or a monster. A tilt down can bring the audience from the sky to the ground. The most famous tilt in film is the opening of Star Wars (1977). After the crawl, the camera tilts down from the stars to a planet as a Star Destroyer passes overhead, filling the frame for what feels like forever.

What is the difference between pan and tilt? A pan turns horizontally. A tilt turns vertically. Many shots combine both, which camera operators call a pan and tilt.

A tilted shot, where the whole frame leans to one side, is a different thing: a Dutch angle.

Panning shot in photography vs film

Search for “panning shot” and most results are about still photography. In photography, a panning shot means following a moving subject with a slow shutter speed, so the subject stays sharp and the background blurs into streaks.

In film, a slow shutter is the wrong move. Filmmakers usually keep the shutter at about double the frame rate, 1/48 or 1/50 of a second at 24 frames per second, which is called the 180 degree shutter rule. Drag it slower and a pan smears. For more on that, read our guide to shutter speed.

How to do a pan shot

1. Put the camera on a tripod with a fluid head. The fluid adds drag, which smooths the start and stop.
2. Level the tripod. A pan on an uneven head drifts up or down as it turns.
3. Rehearse the start frame and the end frame. Know exactly where the pan lands before you roll.
4. Ease in and ease out. Start slowly, reach speed, then slow down before you stop.
5. Keep it slow enough to avoid judder. RED’s guide is a full frame width every seven seconds at 24 frames per second, as a starting point.
6. Give it a reason. A character’s look, a sound or a moving subject should motivate the move.

Plan each pan on your shot list and sketch it in your storyboard, so everyone knows where it starts and ends. If you are shooting coverage for a scene, our guide to film coverage shows where pans fit.

FAQs about panning in film

The Final Cut on panning in film

A pan is the camera turning its head, and it can do more than follow. It can reveal, hide, join two scenes or tell a whole story before anyone speaks.

The 10 pan shot examples above cover every kind, from Snake Eyes’ hidden cuts to Rear Window’s opening. The lesson is the same in each: know why the camera is turning and where it will land.

Here is a drill. Shoot one pan across a room that tells a stranger who lives there. Then shoot it again at half the speed. The slower one will look better.

Next, learn the other two moves in this set: the establishing shot and the 180 degree rule. And for how camera moves shape a scene’s pace, see our internal rhythm examples.