Bending Time Mid-Shot – Zack Snyder’s Speed Ramp

MZed Education

by Mascha DeikovaToday

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Is a speed ramp merely a gimmick? Nowadays, I feel like it is certainly handled like one. Yet it was once a huge breakthrough in cinematic storytelling, especially after Zack Snyder established it in his movies and made it his signature effect. That’s why his name is in this article’s title. Slow motion sliding into real time, or real time snapping into a sudden burst of speed, all without cuts… If it’s not used stylistically, when and where can we use it to create effective stories? Let’s take a look!

A small personal confession: When I started working as a director at a video production company, I tried to include a speed ramp in almost every project. To me, it was one of those techniques that instantly made a video look cool. But I eventually realized that overusing it – or worse, using it without a clear purpose – robs it of its impact. After seeing speed ramps everywhere, I became so tired of the effect that I now try to avoid it altogether. Let’s not repeat my mistake!

Where the effect comes from

Simply put, a speed ramp is a change in playback speed within a single continuous shot. Despite the flashy name, the technique is based on manipulating how quickly we see the action unfold. We covered it in depth in an earlier article: “Manipulating Time Perception – the Storytelling Potential of Frame Rate.” Here’s a quick recap: When you shoot at a higher frame rate than the playback rate, the extra frames will stretch the same action across more time on screen (also called “slow motion”). Shoot at a lower rate than playback, and the opposite happens: the action compresses into fast motion. A speed ramp simply “moves” between these settings inside one continuous shot, instead of picking one rate and holding it for the whole take.

Although fans might attribute this effect to Zack Snyder, the concept behind it is an older one. Remember the famous scene in “The Matrix,” where Neo dodges bullets while the camera seems to fly around his almost-frozen body? Naturally, it’s not the same trick, but it bends time in a similar fashion. The creators also used “ramps” to achieve this. (Here is more.)

Speed ramp as a signature style effect

“300” is a film that made speed ramps legendary and connected them to the director Zack Snyder. Snyder and his team combined footage from multiple cameras with different focal lengths and speed ramping. This allowed a shot to push in tight on the point of impact and then pull back to the wider battlefield smoothly, as though it were one continuous take.

It’s intense, and there are various reasons why it has such a striking effect on us. First, it does for a movie what a comic-book panel does on a page. Namely, it slows your eye down exactly where the artist wants it to linger, then speeds you back up again – into the messy, chaotic battle.

At the same time, the effect makes the warriors appear almost like living statues. The Spartans here aren’t just men; we see them as legends, carved into history.

Fast-forward through history

Three years later, Snyder uses this technique and makes something a bit different. “Watchmen” opens with a wordless montage that jumps through decades of alternate American history — the assassination of JFK, the moon landing, Vietnam — all scored to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

Sometimes we see super slow-motion, sometimes subtle speed ramps, and sometimes the action freezes almost completely. It’s a mix of time manipulation techniques, but they all work beautifully without pulling us out of the story. A speed ramp is, at its core, a way of playing with our perception of how time passes within a shot. Using these techniques to compress twenty-five years of history into five minutes is a great (and very stylized!) way to tell the story while giving the important moments the attention they deserve.

Speed ramping as a window into someone else’s mind

A further example is Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes.” In some scenes, it uses speed ramps to let us peek inside the protagonist’s analytical mind and follow his complicated thought process. See for yourself:

Paired with impactful voice-over text, it does feel as if we are inside Sherlock’s head. The slow-motion breakdown serves the same purpose as Arthur Conan Doyle’s original interior monologues on the page, only translated into visual storytelling.

Speed ramping for the comedic relief

Of course, it’s not always about enhancing the drama, freezing time, or making the scene feel more intense. Used as a visual cliché, it brings good-hearted irony to the story. Thus, in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” editor Paul Rogers used speed ramping in the fight scenes and multiverse jumps to underscore their absurdity and comedic relief. Rogers described his process in granular detail here. For the sequences mentioned, this included adjusting the speed of a shot “from 100 percent speed to 136 percent, back down to 115 percent for a split second, and then up to 200 percent and back down to 100 percent without feeling jumpy.”

That’s not at all the smooth push-and-pull of a Snyder battle. On the contrary: the scenes almost seem to mock it, emphasizing the chaos of the multiverses the story jumps between.

Watch some examples here:

So when does the speed ramp actually earn its place?

Speed ramp isn’t really about Zack Snyder – not anymore. It’s a tool you can use for more than a gimmick or a stylistic trick. If you’re reaching for it in your own edit, ask yourself first what the ramp is actually for in this specific shot. If you can’t answer that in one sentence, it’s probably not earning its place yet.

Have you ever noticed a speed ramp doing real emotional or narrative work, rather than just showing off? Does it pull you into a scene, or does it pull you out of one? And which film do you think used it best – did we miss your favorite here? Let us know in the comments below!

Feature image: film stills from “Everything Everywhere All at Once” by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022; and “300” by Zack Snyder, 2006.

Full disclosure: MZed is owned by CineD.