I am doing what is a dirty low-mode shot. The rig is turned upside down to get the camera lower however here the camera is upside down too (the dirty part). The advantage of the dirty low-mode is how quickly I can get into low-mode. It can sometimes take under 10 seconds to flip the rig, pop in the monitor and tweak the balance although it would be safe to consider 3 minutes to change into dirty low-mode with the camera a foot or so off the ground. Any lower will take longer.

With the camera upside down all we need to do is flip the image in post. There is no “mirroring” issues with this; a question I have been asked many times before. The only problems are that any client monitors need to be turned upside down; which on a big video village or with certain clients may be unfeasible or unsuitable and if you are doing a neg cut the old school way on film: Then you would have to flip the image optically, this would be expensive and a pain in the arse. Your Steadicam Operator will always check at the start of the day when shooting on film if your doing a neg cut or simply going straight to telecine/DI before he offers up dirty low-mode.

Here I am using low-mode not only for the camera height but also so I can fly the camera up and over the bonnet of the car. It works well for this application. Sure there are better ways to do this shot, such as laying track and using a dolly and jib arm, but here we are shooting a music video and are in a dreadful hurry. It should be noted that the director did say… “perfect” a nice word to hear to be sure.

I have now included the whole music video with this clip. It was pretty much entirely done on Steadicam (bar like 2 shots). The DoP was the extraordinary Dave Miller

Low mode tracking up and over a car from Thomas English on Vimeo.

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Here I am shooting a running sequence on the Panaflex 35mm camera. Really I should be using a quad bike or a much lighter camera but sometimes you don’t have a quad bike nor a lighter camera. Dave Miller asked me so nicely, I had to do it.

Steadicam; Running with a Panavision Panaflex from Thomas English on Vimeo.

JP Gossart was shooting a commercial / viral for the new Polar computer. He kindly asked me to Steadicam for him. These Professional cyclists are often able to hit speeds of 50mph. I can’t run that fast so the only option was to vehicle mount onto a tracking vehicle supplied by Bickers.

The SI2K camera was chosen for this job: which worked well. I was particularly impressed by Pier Hausemer s work pulling focus. There are a few tight shots of the Polar sensors which we must have done on a 50mm lens. JP had control of the remote zoom controller and so was choosing his frame sizes. It is no mean feat getting that sharp with a cameraman hanging off the side of the vehicle at 40 odd miles per hour.

We did not use Gyros for financial reasons. This was fine except for one set of shots where we mounted at the front of the tracking vehicle, in low mode a foot off the ground, and caned it around the track at the maximum speed the bugger could travel at. We must have been doing a consistent 60mph. It became quite tricky to operate bent right over forward pulling loads of G-Force in a front on 60mph wind. It shows in those corner shots they chose with the writing overlay. We did loads of those shots at varying speeds and I have been told there were some great takes but that the wobble shot was chosen intentionally to add dynamism. With hindsight I would have liked to have used gyros on those shots. The rest of the Steadicam work I am very happy with.

Steadicam Vehicle Mount: Polar Commercial from Thomas English on Vimeo.