"Keep it Steady, Eddie"
How to keep your shots smooth  

IF you wanna tell tell the difference between amateur and pro films its easy, just look for the one that's wobbling and making the audience seasick (that's us, the amateurs). OK, so how do we get out of this without losing the energy of handheld camera shots?

Umm..Tripods?

If you do get a tripod make sure its a good one, you want a fluid (or Teflon bearing) head so your pans and tilts are smooth. [I was playing with this awful tripod the other day, every time you tried to pan it jerked violently and sqeaked. The effect was kind of like NYPD Blue meets Kingdom of the Mice.] You also wanna get make sure its got a quick release head so you can get your camera on and off it quick and ideally get a lightweight one so its easy to carry around.

So that's our solution then?

Yeah right, like sticking your camera on a stand is gonna make it smooth. It'll make it look professional, but it will also look rigid. Rodriguez says dump the stand - I agree. Whenever the going gets tough and you need to shoot a bunch of stuff real fast the first thing I do is dump the tripod as it vastly slows you down.

Handheld right?

Urr, kindof. The trouble is that you get jitter from your arms etc. so you really need to isolate the camera from your body.

Failing that you will find that a lot of modern camcorders have image stabilizers. These come in two fruit flavours : electronic and optical. I say ignore electronic like the plague. With electronic the picture 'floats' within the CCD chip (CCD chip? - umm..the bit that changes the picture into an electronic signal) thereby decreasing the actual amount of chip able to take a picture, so your picture quality isn't quite as good. Optical image stabilisers like Sony's Steadyshot use a bunch of moving lenses (or something) meaning your picture quality isn't affected - hurrah!

(Tip for the Top - Get close to your subject and go wideangle as much as possible to decrease camera shake.)

Trouble is though even with a stabilizer the problem hasn't completely gone away and your camera movement can feel 'sluggish' as at first the camera may try and compensate for any movement you do thinking that its shake. So let's see what the big boys (and girls) use.

Steadicam®

Strap yourself into a metal body vest and look like you are going to war. For smart use of a Steadicam check out Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining' (all those shots following the kid around on his trike - that's Steadicam) and pretty much every major movie since.
Basically its a series of counterbalanced weights which moves the camera's centre of gravity away from the operator whilst still allowing them to perform camera moves. You need to keep fit if you wanna use a full size one as it can get pretty tiring supporting a full camera's weight. But thankfully Steadicam (the company) have made Steadicam Jr. which is designed to carry lighter cameras like camcorders. Its the same type of thing but without the body vest and with a LCD monitor so you can watch what you are filming without having to look down the viewfinder - neat! Only problem is that it will hit you for £499 - ouch! (Still, that's a fraction of what a full-size Steadicam will cost you).

There are also some pretenders to the Steadicam crown. Glidecam is another counter-balanced system and they have just started importing them into the UK and HandyMan looks to be a Steadicam variant built of metal (although its more expensive).

Dale's Tale of Woe I'm after some smooth shots for my next film, so after some umming and arring (and a cash windfall) I decided to get a Steadicam JR for my camcorder (a Sony VX700). It comes with this really cool intro tape showing you sample Steadicam shots and its inventor Garret Brown explaining how to set it up - nice touch. Now setting up takes a while, as you have to be really delicate with the thing and you have to counterbalance your camera just right. I almost got it perfect (after about 3 hours fiddling) and got some nice shots BUT......then it snapped. Holding it like I was supposed to, one of the arms gave way and a screw flew out. Personally I reckon it was because my camera was too heavy (although the camera's weight was well under the limit its effective weight was greater cos its back heavy). Then the platform jammed up and it took my 3 hours with an engineer to remove my camera from this piece of plastic. Grrr. Anyway, its gone back now and I replaced it with a Glidecam. Good thing is Glidecam is cheaper and built better (metal) although it doesn't have a monitor and low down shots are more difficult (although not impossible).

Then there's the option of a dolly and jib. A dolly is basically a set of wheels that go on the bottom of your tripod and allow you to wheel it around whilst a jib arm is an arm that fits over the top of your tripod that allows you to do crane shots (y'know, those bits where the camera moves up and out allowing you to look down on the whole scene). Hague do a smart Semi-Pro Jib and Dolly for £499. Again, its a question of cash (oh and lugging it around, you'll need a car).

So what's the low-budget/no-budget alternative? Well, Peter Jackson (director of Braindead, Heavenly Creatures etc.) built his own Steadicam for $15 for his first film, Bad Taste, but the consencus is that it ain't worth the effort of trying to build your own (and Peter Jackson is pretty good at turning his hand to mechanical type stuff) as for the money for parts you might as well buy one. So here's a few cheats. They're obviously not going to work as well as professional stuff but they're a damn site cheaper.

BagCam®

Get a plastic bag, ideally a good strong big one. Put your camera inside and cut a hole near the bottom on of the sides, large enough for your lens to poke through but not large enough for your camera to fall out. Now hold the back at the top and try walking around with it. This should isolate the camera from your movement (a bit) and make shots smoother (a bit). Try getting hold of one of those bags made out of string as this should work even better.

MyArmHurtsCam®

Get a monopod (like a tripod, but with only one leg), add weights to the bottom of it (adjust weight to taste). Now screw your camera into position on the top and hold the monopod underneath the camera. Now try moving about. The centre of gravity is lower so it should move smoother. However this could hurt the old arm a bit if you do this all day.

BalloonCam®

OK, now something really stupid. Seeing as camcorders are getting lighter, why not buy a bunch of helium balloons (and I'm talking about quite a few of them) and attach them to your camera. Instant crane shots!
Now a couple of major things can go wrong here. 1) You may not get enough lift so your camera could never get up - try adding some more balloons. 2) You could get too much lift so you might never see your camera again - add some guy ropes so that you can control the camera. 3) Your camera might not point at the right stuff - err, counterbalance the whole rig so that it points groundwards.
If you are mad enough to try this one let us know how it goes!

OK, so the conclusion of this might seem to be - buy the stuff for the job. But at least you now know that the equipment is out there and that there are cheap techniques to get pro results.

If you've heard of or tried anything else then please, get in contact.

SmallPrint : The author accepts no responsibility for broken cameras or arms as a result of doing this stupid stuff.