The vertigo shot, also called a dolly zoom or Hitchcock zoom, is a camera technique that combines a physical camera movement with a simultaneous, compensating zoom to keep the primary subject constant in size within the frame while the background dramatically expands or contracts. Moving the camera forward while zooming out, or moving backward while zooming in, creates a deeply disorienting spatial distortion in which the subject appears stable while the environment around them seems to collapse inward or stretch impossibly outward.

The technique was developed and popularized by Alfred Hitchcock's cinematographer Irmin Roberts in the 1958 film Vertigo, where it was used to visualize the protagonist's acrophobia, and has since become one of cinema's most recognizable visual metaphors for psychological disorientation, revelation, or sudden dread. The perceptual effect works because the perspective compression or expansion caused by changing the focal length is not cancelled by the physical camera movement: the two changes create opposite effects on scale but incompatible effects on spatial depth, producing a visual result that the human visual system cannot reconcile with normal physical experience. The effect has been used extensively in films and commercial productions to signal moments of sudden realization, fear, or reality-shifting importance. It is technically demanding to execute smoothly, as the rate of camera movement and zoom change must be precisely coordinated to keep the subject size constant throughout the move.

In AI video generation, "dolly zoom," "vertigo effect," or "Hitchcock zoom with background compression" describes this technique. The effect is well-represented in training data from cinematic footage, and including both the camera movement direction and the zoom direction in the prompt helps generation tools produce the characteristic spatial distortion rather than a simple zoom or dolly in isolation.