tracking shot

(or truck)

  a smooth shot in which the camera moves alongside ('tracking within') the subject, usually mounted on a dolly, in a side-to-side motion (relative to the scene or the action); also known as following shot; sometimes used interchangeably with dolly shot, pull back (pull-out, push-out, widen-out or push-back) shot, track back (moving away) or track in (or push-in) (moving forward), or zoom shot; see also Steadicam

  Examples: from Eyes Wide Shut (1999) (pictured here); some other famous examples of tracking shots are examples of Steadicam 'tracking', including Danny's point of view (POV) shots in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), when wheeling around the Overlook Hotel; the shot on top of the train or the shot walking through the camp in Bound for Glory (1976); the shot from the dressing room to the ring in Raging Bull (1980); the following and tracking shots in Marathon Man (1976); the entire Hitchcock film Rope (1948) - composed of long segments of uncut film; Mikhail Kalatozov's amazing hand-held tracking shot in I Am Cuba (1964) - beginning with views of a rooftop beauty pageant with contestants wearing swimwear that descended to an outdoor pool and went underwater; the continuous opening shot in Robert Altman's The Player (1992), or the lengthy 7-minute final shot in The Passenger (1975) which ended back in the Spanish hotel room and discovered the murdered body of David Locke (Jack Nicholson); also the famous track-back shot from upstairs to the outside of an apartment in Frenzy (1972) (pictured); the 8 minute shot in Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967) viewing surrealistic and nightmarishly apocalyptic images of the roads littered with traffic jams, car wrecks and accidents, bloody casualties, and burning cars; the opening shot in Boogie Nights (1997) that tracked into the 70s disco; also the 3-minute entrance of Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco into the Copacabana club in Scorsese's GoodFellas (1990); the lengthy and uninterrupted crane and hand-held Steadicam shots in Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men (2006) in the car chase in the woods scene, and the 6-minute trek through an embattled war zone; and the uncut, single 5 1/2-minute Steadicam shot of British soldier Robbie (James McAvoy) along the embattled beach at 1940s Dunkirk in Atonement (2007) as the British Expeditionary Forces retreated