Focus Puller

You won’t believe it — I didn’t — but the person responsible for keeping each and every shot of a movie in focus never looks through a camera lens.

“No,” says focus puller Baird Steptoe. “We do not look through the camera at all.”

Steptoe has worked as a first assistant cameraman on films from The Sixth Sense to Thor to last year’s Grownups Two. He says he’s learned to judge distances — precise distances — with his naked eye alone.

“I mean, I can tell you roughly from you to me right now,” he says. “I would say about 2-11.”

Two feet 11 inches, that is. Not that I brought along a tape measure for corroboration. But Steptoe has an eye you don’t mess around with. On a movie, if he’s wrong, he could lose his job.

Turns out focus pullers don’t look through the lens because the camera operators do that — they’re busy framing the shot, panning and tilting, and they don’t have a spare hand to focus in and out. So in Hollywood, where everything takes a village, pulling focus has become a separate operation, a job all to itself.

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(Source: NPR Special Series—Keen Eyes, Uncanny Instincts Keep Films In Sharp Focus)