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Poor Man’s quickie Tyler Mount
Just got back in from a location shoot where we had to emergency rig something that looked terrible, but worked quite well… so I thought I’d share it.
We were on a commercial shoot, and suddenly had the unplanned opportunity to shoot a driving trucking/dolly shot of some people jogging down the street. Well, we were traveling light today… so we didn’t have any gear with us to do a proper vehicle camera mount. So we rigged this up at the last second… took about three minutes.
We strapped open (with just a bungee) the rear driver’s side door of our Jeep. We dug through the grip stuff and came up with two 3/8″ threaded hooks and wing nuts. I used those to attach a tall C-stand riser to the underside of the Jeep’s roll bars (fortunately there were convenient holes already in the bars). That let me extend the C-stand riser out through the door. On the C-stand’s baby pin I put a grip arm and a couple of grip heads, that rested on the open door (I considered just taking the door off, which is easy enough… but I actually needed it for a resting point). To the cross member I could attach a bungee cord which held the camera (just looped through the handle) to stabilize and dampen the shot…
By the way, the two seconds it took me to snap the top picture was the only time I didn’t have my hands on the camera. I trusted the rig, but not that much.
It all worked really well, probably a fair bit better than expected. Maybe not quite dolly-track smooth, but pretty darn good shots with both 35mm and 80mm prime lenses.
It wouldn’t be my first choice to do it this way, but in a pinch it got it done.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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1 Reply
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“First, make it WORK. THEN you make it pretty” – me.
Looks like it was workable AND fun.
We did bungie-cam from the back of our van once, making an x-shaped web of bungies across the rear cargo door opening. Hung the betacam from it using the top handle, with me hand-holding it as well. We DID use a spare seatbelt strap to tether me that time.
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