[Mark Suszko]

Maybe you didn’t pick up the the description… you don’t *ride* the bike set up as a dolly: you -walk- or run alongside it, while it’s large wheels even-out the small bumps. No tracks. Works better if you de-pressurize the tires a little. And I mentioned that you replace the back, geared wheel with another, non-geared front wheel, no chain, and it becomes silent. You get the bike and the extra front wheel at the Salvation Army or Goodwill for about ten dollars.

I also have a DIY “Fig Rig” (Imitation of the real one from Manfrotto, which was just too pricy for me) made from a discarded BMX bike wheel rim that has a slotted, steel angle-iron spot-welded across it. Works really well for hand-held stuff, The alley behind the bike shop had tons of these for free.

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t care much what you call it. I get why it’s happening and I have no issues about it.

I AM curious to know if and how some of the more useful tips and related threads that were generated here under the old name will be accessible in some kind of archive in the new system? Or like Cortez, are we burning the boats?

[Mark Suszko]

“Anything Apple: NLE debates and discussions”

[Mark Suszko]

Not six-plus hours. For an outdoor shoot that’s basically un-lit except for the sun and maybe one practical….Unless it was a big-budget Hollywood movie.

You don’t need huge wide shots for this, except maybe for a single establishing shot that it’s a park. Your chase and shoot-out actions are all things that can be shot in a smaller space within that park or forest or whatever. In fact you could use that to your advantage, if it’s for example a very dense forest and the trees block everything in the distance by creating little slits in the visual field, like peep-holes, or slats in a privacy fence, thru which the pursuing figures move, and the pursued figure hides. Like a Bev Doolittle painting of horses among birch trees or the like. Most of the bullet hits in the gun battle will be glancing off the trees, until the combatants can close to rock-throwing ranges. This also gives the lighting plot a look of dappled light and shadow, which you can post-process as day-for-night if needed, but it need not *be* night to make this a cool sequence. You’d need to find the right kind of dense wooded terrain, and create the motivation/excuse for the characters to end up in it. It would work the same if it was a lumber yard, or a warehouse full of shelf units and pallets, a train yard with many parallel tracks and sets of boxcars, a Library stacks area, a large cube-farm of identical paneled workstations, like Neo’s day job in The Matrix… a packed public car garage, etc. And the garage or library seems like it makes more sense as a place for the chase to happen than some park… but I haven’t read your script. Chases are often boring, because they’re not clever, don’t really have believable stakes, or they don’t actually move the plot along. Often, they are set-pieces the director and camera op are staging to show off their skills, but that’s ego, not story-telling.

[Mark Suszko]

The gimbal can be used in more ways, and you can always attach it to something that rolls and have your dolly as well.

But I try to avoid gimmicks and hand-held or steadicam shots, and rather compose a relatively “static” frame and just let things happen within it, staging the action and using actor movement in depth, not unlike theater or soap opera work.

I add the illusion of motion to my relatively static frames, when needed, by sometimes making the editing take a more kinetic pace. Or I will do slow pans or zooms where dolly moves or slider moves are more today’s fashion.

It’s a style I “grew up in” because all my work has always been relatively low- budget and so I had to make-do with what I did have, or could bodge together. In 30 years of shooting I’ve only rented a Chapman doorway dolly twice (sans track) and a jib maybe three times. But I’ve done things like suspend a camera from a wooden board to get vertical shots, or clamp a hi-hat to the top of a tall stepladder instead of a jib or crane, Or make a pintle mount for the bucket on a utility company bucket truck. Or make a bean bag with a strap for my knee, for shooting out the doorway of a JetRanger or Blackhawk. Or strap a lipstick cam to the pilot-streerable “night sun” spotlight under a chopper…Or strap cameras to cars in various ways. Yes, I did the “camera in a fishtank” thing to shoot underwater once. Worked great.

These days a favorite trick of mine is to shoot 4K or better and do re-frames, synthetic dollies and buttery-smooth sloooooow zooms in post.

One fun one, I can still use today to mimic drone shots: a 30-foot length of PVC with a lipstick camera on one end and the battery pack, Casio 4-inch LCD monitor at the other, for balance. Connected to a portable Betacam deck. Looked like a Surf-fishing outfit at a distance, but I got great high-angle b-roll of state fair carnival rides and the like, as well as being able to poke it thru a crash fence and get worm’s-eye views of sprint cars on the dirt oval. Very cool look. Today I’d “pole-cam” with a go-pro or gimballed Osmo, and Bluetooth monitoring. You kidz gots it all too easy today, yadda-yadda-yadda…

As to your dolly, lots of things can be used as makeshift dollies; wheelchairs are pretty common and easy to get at garage sales or thrift stores… but did you know a 10-speed bicycle makes a pretty good all-terrain, indoor/outdoor dolly too? Replace the seat post with straight tubing and put your hi-hat or Osmo on that. You may have to replace the back wheel with another front wheel to avoid the gear clicking. But half-wrecked 10-speeds are practically free at the “Sally”.

It adds to my fun when I come up with stuff like that and it works; the surprise reaction of folks who think I used something expensive is a hoot.

[Mark Suszko]

You can do away with most of the shots in that sequence and it will be smoother and still tell the story better.

You only need:

Man leaves.

Woman, already in car, obviously watching him, follows.

New location; establishing shot, woman’s car, foreground, parked. Or to be fancy, car rolls into shot and parks first.

Medium, woman gets out of the car in the new location, walks out of shot, obviously looking for the man.

Then your peeking-thru-the-trees shot and etc.

If you look at very old films, they wasted a lot of time depicting every step of a character moving from one location to another… get into car, car drives down street, pulls up to new location, etc…. but then they took a cue from how such transitions were done in radio drama, “Well, here we are in (location)” and skipped most or all of the driving around shots, front of building, walking in, taking the elevator, etc. in order to move the story along. You only need the guy walking out of frame, and you can dissolve or wipe to his entrance at the next place, especially if the new shot has something visual that identifies it. Audiences “get it” if you create a shot that encapsulates or explains the new location.

[Mark Suszko]

These days it’s a bit of an old-fashioned solution, but for many years I did this kind of job with a scan converter, which connects between the output of the laptop and the projector, and live-converts that signal to video which you then send to a stand-alone recorder.

The beauty of this setup is that it claims no system resources of any kind from the laptop or desktop machine, as screen-capture software might. It just passively grabs whatever is being sent to the projector or monitor. When I used these, we took a VGA or SVGA out of the laptop, analog, thru the scan converter, into a portable video recorder.

They make scan converters in HD now, with HDMI and SDI in and out. It’s how we run out teleprompters, and feed laptop graphics into a switcher for live-switched programs. Some places, you can rent them, for the occasional gig. If you plan to do this monthly or more often, makes more sense to buy one.

[Mark Suszko]

Are you re-doing “Apocalypse Now“?!??

I can’t imagine why or how it could take you that long to shoot some guys running thru a park scene. Even with multi-angle coverage. Do they stop in the middle for an hour of dialogue? Maybe you could describe the scene in more detail, and I’d get it?

[Mark Suszko]

Movies with “Terminator” budgets often shoot car scenes on a “process trailer”: a very low trailer that holds the car and has enough room around the sides to hold the grip gear, camera rigs, etc. The actors then can act, and not have to also drive… this is safest and gives great results. Alternately, they put a techno-crane on a Porche Cayanne and have a pro driver drive parallel to the actor vehicle, “flying” the camera alongside. Much cooler results… if you can afford that. You can’t.

The “poor man’s process trailer” is to use a wrecker truck or car towing hitch from U-Haul with a pickup truck to tow the car and shoot from. But check local laws about being in the towed car under way.

The advent of gopros and the like means a lot of what used to only be done on process trailers is now done with “stick-ons”,

But your Gecko thing seems like it would be too close for the shot, unless you used the fisheye lens of the gopro. You can flatten out that fisheye in post, of course, but Todd was correct that what you really want is to frame the shot from a foot or two further back, perhaps even using the outline of the window as a framing tool.

As for potentially losing the rig… well, build it good. ☺ Use a LOT of gaffer tape. Also, add safety cables so if it breaks free, it doesn’t hit the road or become a hazard.

Driving shots should always be done under the most careful conditions possible: un-used or blocked-off roads, and low speeds, if the talent is driving.

And don’t have the driver actor take their eyes off the road at all. Ever. I can’t count how many times in a movie, the driver turns his attention to the passenger for what seems like days, and I’m just cringing, waiting for the car crash that *should* be happening.

[Mark Suszko]

On your budget of zero dollars, shoot day for night, but shoot at dusk or early morning, so you have at least some level of overall light. Then play with it in post; this is much easier to do now than even 2 years ago.

You could add a fake streetlight anywhere you need one: just put a lamp on a pole and frame so the pole isn’t seen… or make a prop pole that’s just high enough to fill your frame.