The Single Hardest Move with a Steadicam

[Charles Papert]

Just about everyone who is serious about operating a stabilizer is familiar with the basic exercises: walking the line, aiming at a cross/X etc. These are excellent for learning how to walk with the rig and operate with a light touch. Real-world shots can incorporate so many different aspects of operating that they could function as a whole exercise unto themselves!

The other week I did a shot which involved an actor walking through a hospital ward, looking at various patients. As originally designed, it was to be a shot preceding the actor and another one that showed his point of view, panning to catch glimpses into private rooms and down hallways. However this evolved into a much more complex one that require the camera to rotate around him, move off into his point of view and bring him back into the frame  multiple times and different ways. We rehearsed it probably 15 times with second team, then did about as many takes with the actor. Afterwards I spent some time thinking about it and why it felt like one of the hardest shots I'd ever done, and eventually boiled it down to a few single elements, diabolically combined.

Consider pan and tilt for a minute. Learning to operate the pan axis is a game of subtlety; assuming your pan bearing is good quality and properly centered, getting off a nice clean feathered pan is "relatively" simple. Tilting however requires a completely different approach, in that the further from level one tilts the rig, the more force is required to stop it and/or keep it in place. Much of this depends on your drop time, of course. However, it is much more likely that one will introduce unwanted activity in the roll axis than in pan, due to the increased level of force required to control the rig.

Now, on to forward motion. Moving at a constant speed is easy, but acceleration is difficult. Starting/stopping the rig, or putting on a burst of speed during a move will tend to make the rig pendulum to some degree (again, regulated by the drop time) which must be absorbed by the operator's gimbal hand. When you've mastered walking towards your X, try doing it in little bursts rather than a continuous walk--much harder! And, side to side acceleration is more vicious than forward-backward acceleration in that errors will show up in the roll axis, i.e. your horizon.

Now imagine all of these things happening at once, and repeating over and over! Such was the case with this particular shot. Here's a detailed description of just one section of this pit of snakes. It began with the camera being behind and to the right of the actor, walking down the hall. Off to the right is a corridor, and from the corridor emerges a hospital gurney being pushed by some orderlies. We push past the actor and as soon as possible cut left in front of him as the gurney swings out into our hallway, and we tilt down to get a look at the patient's face while passing each other. We rotate around the gurney, then tilt up to the actor and continue to push into a closeup (see attached diagram).

The specific details from an operating perspective were this: my first move is to accelerate forwards and to the left in an arc, which means that I am dealing with acceleration in two different directions, one after another. Arcs are exceptionally tricky to control because your counter-force has to change direction mid-move; as you are reducing the influence in one axis, you are increasing it in another. Somewhere towards the end of the arc, I begin to tilt down to the gurney while counter-panning as it passes me; simultaneously my body is rotating left around the rig to keep facing the gurney. The arc turns into a semi-circle as I begin to chase after the gurney and I now start to tilt up. Mid-tilt, I am still experiencing the acceleration in two axes due to the circular move, and it is extremely hard to keep the roll axis unaffected as I have no reference to my horizon (a bubble will be useless here because of the acceleration). As I finish the tilt, I begin to decelerate my push in on the actor, while adjusting the boom height to maintain consistent headroom.

The thing that you may want to take away from this is start practicing bidirectional acceleration; make a fast little arc (like the shape of a lower-case "r") while pointing straight ahead, and watch what happens to your horizon. Make sure to come to a neat stop at the end, and hold for a few seconds. Now try adding a tilt into it (i.e. start tilted down, and come up to level by the end). It's really snarky stuff!

Have at it, chaps....

[Charles King]

WoW!!, thank you CP for this. I truely admire your continual hands on experience. This is a very good advice and tip for us all. Thank you so much. It must be very difficult than it sounds. I'll have to read through this again. Thank you kindly.

[Brad Jefferson]

Charles P.

Amazing technical challenge.

Do you have someone following/supporting you throughout your route?  Or, are you solo?

Please let us know when this show you did is on the air.

Thanks for sharing this information.

[Alan Dague-Greene]

Hey Charles, this is a great challenge! It took me a little while to understand the move, but I think I got it.

Did this shot involve any overcranking? In my mind, it sounds very fast, particularly with the opposing motion of the camera and the gurney in the first half of the shot. Combined with panning right while rotating around the patient's head ... well, I would just have to see the shot to really understand what the implications of such movement are.

Can you give us some sense of scale, in terms of how long the actor's walk was, or how far from the corridor the shot began? It sounds tight enough to make the acceleration a real concern, but with enough weight, any acceleration has greater influence.

Lastly, if the shot is intended to be a semi-POV, why would the actor need to "cheat" so far to his right for the end of the shot? I'm guessing this is so you can finish your arc without too much extra movement to get back to the actor, but wouldn't he remain on roughly the same side of the gurney as it passes? Or does the actor veer off to the right side of the hallway as he looks back, then turning toward you for the close-up?

I find sideways acceleration difficult simply due to hand position. If the rig is going to be swinging away from my palm, I just have a moment to get my fingers in gear to catch it before it's too late!

Thanks for your detailed description. I'm off to search eBay for used gurneys.

[Charles Papert]

Do you have someone following/supporting you throughout your route?  Or, are you solo?

Please let us know when this show you did is on the air.

On this particular shot I didn't use a spotter until the very end (well past this section) as I was backpedaling near a wall and wanted to make sure I didn't bang into it. The main part was too "swirly" and not enough room for an extra body, and I didn't need one.

This was on a feature actually, so it won't be out for close to a year. It's called "In the Valley of Elah"

[Charles Papert]

Did this shot involve any overcranking? In my mind, it sounds very fast, particularly with the opposing motion of the camera and the gurney in the first half of the shot. Combined with panning right while rotating around the patient's head ... well, I would just have to see the shot to really understand what the implications of such movement are.

Even though I was countering a moving object (the gurney, it was fast but not too fast to see what was going on--certainly not an "ER" level shot. The trick with a shot like this is to regulate the speed of the tilt. The camera may be moving quickly (and your body even quicker around it) but if the subject remains in frame the whole time, that speed won't really register that much. However, the tilt is a complete change of perspective so if it is done at a reasonable pace, the shot won't feel hurried.

Can you give us some sense of scale, in terms of how long the actor's walk was, or how far from the corridor the shot began? It sounds tight enough to make the acceleration a real concern, but with enough weight, any acceleration has greater influence.

Tough to put an accurate number on it but I would say that we were about 8-10 feet from the corridor at the point in which I pushed past the actor. The whole section of the move as described above probably took about 5-6 seconds.

Lastly, if the shot is intended to be a semi-POV, why would the actor need to "cheat" so far to his right for the end of the shot? I'm guessing this is so you can finish your arc without too much extra movement to get back to the actor, but wouldn't he remain on roughly the same side of the gurney as it passes? Or does the actor veer off to the right side of the hallway as he looks back, then turning toward you for the close-up?

The positions were probably not completely accurate as depicted, but the idea was that the gurney swung out into the corridor, and it made a much neater transition to be able to tilt up and discover the actor as the gurney wipes through frame. When one does a 180 like this with action in the middle, the audience will never feel a sense of dislocation. Hallways are immensely cheatable locations! I learned just how much you can push the envelope during my tenure on Scrubs, where we would often end a hallway walk-and-talk by having one actor turn around and face the other, and the camera settles on an over-the-shoulder shot with the hallway in the background. When we turned around for the reverse coverage, if the actors were to remain exactly in position and the camera simply found the correct angle to match the over-the-shoulder, it would be pointing directly into the side wall as a background. However, since no cameraman ever wants to shoot into a wall when they don't have to, we would simple "clock" everyone around 90 degrees so their background was down the hall the other direction. It seems like a massive cheat at the time, but the reality is for the audience that as long as the actors have the proper perspective and orientation between them when you cut between the two sides, the audience doesn't "feel" the background's rotation and expect it to be literal. Does this make sense or might I have to make another diagram (it's heady stuff to be sure)...? One of the reasons I bring this up is that I have seen many examples in indie filmmaking where reverse coverage has jumped the line, likely due to the inexperienced director or DP not realizing how to cheat the actors away from a wall that makes the "correct" camera placement possible!

I find sideways acceleration difficult simply due to hand position. If the rig is going to be swinging away from my palm, I just have a moment to get my fingers in gear to catch it before it's too late!

Absolutely, no question that having the rig pointed to either side makes acceleration a really nasty issue. In fact, the shot outlined above did just that as it continued, in that I allowed the actor to move alongside me and then I tracked him in profile as he looked into some patient rooms, eventually allowing him to move past me (via my deceleration) into a shot that followed him from behind...and then I pushed past him again, just like the beginning of the move...eh, I'll give up here as it just kept going!

[Alan Dague-Greene]

Thanks for clarifying everything, all of that makes sense. And now we wait to see the final product ...

[Alan Dague-Greene]

Bump. In the Valley of Elah is out now. Let's all go see it and spot this shot.

[Charles Papert]

I haven't seen it yet, have no clue if the shot ended up in the film (but I imagine it was cut up regardless).

[James Sutherland]

Hi Guys,

I saw the making of Rush Hour 3 the other day. In a fighting sequence the steadicam operator had to close up on 2 faces of the cast in a fight. For some reason he had to go down (could not make out what for) then up and then 4 big steps down to where a wall an floor meet (the 2 cast members ended up there in their fighting sequence).  This all happened in a matter of 4 second.  What I saw was that the operator almost started in a squat position, griping the arm firmly at the gimbal with his right hand (also the side he had to go to end up in the face on the floor) and the other just above the monitor clamp (on the post). It looked like he was controlling the tilts with that bottom hand. Doing abrupt stops and acceleration all happening to pin point blocking. They used a big 435 ARRI camera so I would assume it is hard to control such fast movements in different directions at once. You guys should check it out he was really gripping that post.

[Charles Papert]

That was presumably Jimmy Muro who also DP'd the film--Jim is a master of physical pyrotechnics with the rig, always has been. Check out his stuff at Steadishots if you haven't already.

Fast tilts can be one of the more tricky bits of business with a full-size rig (a 435 is not really "big" in our world--more like midsize!). Lots of intertia to deal with, stopping can be dicey. Often helpful to continue the move for a fraction of a second by booming the arm in the same direction, in other words, during the tilt down start booming; stop the tilt and continue booming just a little bit. This allows the energy to be absorbed into the boom and feather to a stop.

It's not too unusual to have to alter the position of the hand on the post depending on the needs of the shot. Today I had to get the lens as low as possible, so I used a long J-bracket and had my operating hand probably 4 inches above the gimbal and the other hand holding onto the top bone of the arm with the arm boomed down all the way. The lens was mere inches from the ground, and this was with the post retracted. If I had had the time, I would have extended the post all the way which would have dropped the camera a few more inches. I don't use a Superpost but in this method I am able to scrape the ground. Being 5'7" works to my advantage in low-mode!

[Charles Papert]

Well, I finally saw "Elah" today, and of course the shot I describe was not in the film. However, there were 4 sequences that had a significant amount of Steadicam still in the movie, and I was pleased to see that the takes used were by and large good ones. A couple of bits that will likely end up on my reel once it comes out on DVD and I can access the footage.