this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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I’m a steadicam operator. I love what I do. When people learn about it, I often get questions about working with such and such actor, what was it like? Did you get star struck and so on... I honestly couldn’t care less about stardom and all that gossip. I want to talk about how I got to fly an Alexa35 with a Probe lens, or how I love filming dancers because I get to transfer emotions through the movement of the camera, turning the audience into an extra dancer.
I also do some engineering on the side to create camera accessories with 3D printing, electronics, soldering and MCU programming. Conversations about those subject are completely inexistant outside of the internet for me and maybe 3 or 4 colleagues.
Turning the audience into an extra dancer, damn that so cool, I understand why you love that part. It really makes you think about all the creativity it takes and how artistic it really is! And it often gets over looked..
It really is, you can transfer emotions through the camera’s position, a slow creep around a corner, when stalking on someone, panic and fear by shaking the camera a bit or doing fast accelerations and movements. Dancing is amazing with the camera (my wife is a modern dancer), it takes so much out of you to move that 60lb camera around though it’s intense.
Dude, I'd ask so many questions if you brought that up in regular conversation and I'm not in your line of work at all. That sounds awesome.
Ask away! I’ll do my best to answer.
I do a lot of directing for live broadcast. Not many projects have a budget for steadicam ops but I love when they do. It’s a constant battle for movement and smoothness, and steadicam is at the pinnacle.
I actually also do live broadcast. I’ve been working on a morning shot for a major network and they have two steadicams on set at the same time!! Live steadicam is a very different beast that teaches you a complete different approach of operating compared to scripted shows. You only have one take with a couple of rehearsals if you’re lucky then when you’re called to “make your nove” there’s no going back. No second take, then when it over, it’s too late, you’re done. At first I was so scared to even do the show I was almost paralyzed and failed my first rakes. I hop on the coma and apologized. That’s when the director went on the headset and said. It’s okay, you blew it, thousands of people saw it, you can’t take it back, now do r fuck up the next one, focus on the next shot. I had a lightbulb moment and now I just “here goes nothing” before every take. If you don’t care about failing, you won’t fail as much. And if you do, you can keep your head on the next shot.
Great advice, that’s honestly why I love live, because if you screw up it’s in the past, we’re on to the next one. A lot of what I do is either sports or bands, so it’s very, very chaotic. Shots can’t really be planned, so you have to be quick and just send it and hope for the best.
Oh man sports is such a rush! My favorite event I ever did was the Fortnite world Championships finals. 100 players on stage fighting each other. We had 4 Steadicams on stage (plus 2 jibs and a bunch of peds and hh) total we had around 800 inputs on the switcher (100 players= 100 screen capture, 100 webcam pov, 100 stats graph, they also had dozens of god mode cameras flying in the virtual world, AR/VR green screens on one of the jibs, … it was madness!!). The goal was to get a OTS shot of the winner while he fires the last bullet and the winner signs shows up. It was such a rush!