Camera moves that make a website look like a product
Dolly-in, orbit, tilt-reveal — and the depth of field underneath them. A practical guide to choosing a camera move for a page, and to using focus as emphasis.
A website in a 3D scene is not automatically interesting. Put a page on a plane, spin it, and you get the same slightly cheap effect as a PowerPoint transition. What makes these shots read as product photography is restraint: one clear move, and a lens that tells you where to look.Here is how to pick.
Start with what the page is doing
The camera move should agree with the page's own composition.Dolly-in pushes straight toward the plane. It is the safe, confident default, and it is almost always right for a hero section — the page opens wide, then draws you into the headline. If you are unsure, this is the one.Orbit arcs around the plane, so the page catches the light at an angle. It flatters dense, colorful interfaces — dashboards, galleries, anything with a lot going on — because the parallax gives the composition depth that a straight-on shot flattens.Tilt-reveal starts low and rotates up into frame. It suits long pages and vertical formats, and it is the most "cinematic" of the three, which also means it is the easiest to overuse.Macro stays close and moves very little. Use it when a single detail is the point: a pricing toggle, one card, a piece of type.
Depth of field is emphasis, not decoration
The blur in Frametic is computed from a focal length and a focus distance, so it behaves like a lens rather than a filter. That makes it a compositional tool.Two settings do most of the work:
Focal length. Longer compresses the scene and blurs the background harder — the look of a product shot. Shorter keeps more of the page legible and feels more like an establishing shot.
Bokeh. How strong the out-of-focus falloff gets. A little goes far; if the page's own text is hard to read, you have gone too far.
The rule of thumb: your viewer should be able to read the thing you want them to read, and not quite be able to read everything else.
Point the focus at something specific
By default the camera focuses on the middle of the plane, which is rarely where the interesting thing is. You can anchor focus to the top, the bottom, or a custom point — and the custom point is draggable directly on your captured screenshot, so you are choosing the focus by looking at your actual page rather than guessing at coordinates.Put it on the headline. Put it on the one UI element the video is about.
Rack focus, and the bug it taught us
A rack focus moves the focus point during the shot: start soft on the header, land sharp on the call to action. Done well it is the most filmic thing in the toolkit, because attention moves without the camera moving.It also produced our favourite bug.Frametic can scroll the page during a render, so a long landing page can travel past the camera. Scrolling changes which part of the plane sits at which distance — which quietly changed the focus distance too. The result: you would set a deliberate rack focus, and the scroll would drag it somewhere else halfway through the shot. The focus wandered on its own.The fix was to decide which one wins. A rack focus is an explicit instruction, so it now holds through the scroll; automatic focus tracking applies only when you have not asked for a transition. Stated as a rule:
How focus behaves during scroll
If you set a manual focus transition, it runs exactly as authored, regardless of scrolling. If you do not, focus follows the page as it moves.
Less is more, genuinely
The strongest videos we have seen through Frametic use one camera move, a moderate depth of field, and no scroll at all. The page is doing the work; the camera is just presenting it.Start with dolly-in, put the focus on your headline, and change one thing at a time.
