Cinematography

I do not own any picture from movies that were made using multi-plane imaging.

Therefore, I can only suggest you to read P. Ramaeker paper on split-field diopter [1]. What is the split-field diopter (called also filter)? Just use your favorite web search engine and you will find hundreds of photos, sites, blogs that are related to this term.

In short, the split-field diopter is a special lens built of a half of an ordinary lens and a second half of flat plate of glass. The diopter is placed just in front of the camera lens.

In practice it might be simply an additional lens that is put in a so-called off-axis position vs the camera main lens optical axis. For instance it can be a divergent lens as the one own by me and shown below

Let's put this lens in front of our camera (I used an old FujiFilm FinePix S5500 digital camera) slightly shifted to the left as compared to the central position of the field-of-view. As below

Note, that I put the print of the ISO 12233 test chart at the window green frame. And that is the object at which I focused my camera. After having zoomed the image properly I registered the sharp image of the test (place in reverese by abstractedness) in the right side of the image. And a strongly blurred image of something in the distance. Note, that the camera was hold by me at a distance of ~3m from the test chart. That's what I registered

Putting the diverging lens at a proper place resulted in such image

The cars that suddenly became visible were parked... 100 m away from me! Note, that I did not change any setup of the camera. The F-number was relatively small.

So, what is happening here? How does the split-field diopter work? To understand it let's once again discuss how is formed the image at the camera sensor. The two characters shown below are separated by some distance.

At the plane at which the reversed F image is formed the image of the G character is out-of-focus - blurred. Therefore, the object that is in the far field relative to the F object are not sharply imaged. However, let us put the additional diverging lens. here, it will be placed after the main lens. However, it leads to exaclty the same results as in ordinary split-field diopter application and works the same way.

The diverging lens displace the image plane associated to G to the same place where is formed the F image. Therefore, at the same image plane are formed images of objects that belong to different object planes.

That is multi-plane imaging.

This technique was used in making of many movies. Among them I would like to name "Equillibrium", "Pulp Fiction" or "Иди и смотри (Come and see)". The last title can be found at YT, look at 1:58:45 (horizontal split) or 2:09:00 (vertical split).