Video · LensNO.033 / 166

Watch: The aperture opens bit by bit: the person stays sharp while the street behind gets softer and softer and the streetlights turn into round bokeh. The audience's eye has only one place left to go.A line-art demo that only illustrates the technique, not finished footage.

Video · Lens

Shallow Depth of Field浅景深

Only the subject is sharp and everything in front and behind is blurred, locking the audience's eye in one place.

Category: Lens
Group: Basics
Medium: Video
Library: 033 / 166

Want to merge it with other techniques (shot size, lighting, style…) into one full prompt? Click “Add to combo”, then pick one from each of the other terms.

Prompt templates are written from how generation models usually behave and have not yet been verified one by one with real generations. “Common pitfalls” are judgment from experience, not official limits.

When to use it

Character close-ups, products, lifting a person out of a messy setting.

Prompt template

shallow depth of field, wide aperture around f/1.4, focus locked on the eyes, background lights melting into soft round bokeh, slight foreground blur.

Sample prompt · generate a video directly

The technique comes first, followed by the scene, action, performance and duration. Paste it straight into a video model and swap in your own characters and plot.

Shallow depth of field, wide aperture around f/1.4, close shot. On a street on New Year's Eve, a girl turns back to look at the camera; focus is locked on her eyes, and the fairy lights and crowd behind her melt into soft round bokeh. Her breath is visible in the cold air. The camera pushes in slightly, 4 seconds.

Common pitfalls

Even the subject is soft, with focus not on the eyes.
The blur edge looks like a cutout, hair stuck to the background.
Shallow focus everywhere loses the spatial relationships.

Parameter tips

Say where the focus lands; don't use it for wide shots or shots that establish the space.