Filming Equipment

For those of you who are normal, you’ll probably be completely uninterested in this blog post, and those people make up pretty much the entirety of my small audience. So, yay.

But for me this is FAWKIN AWSUM YA CHEEKI CUNTZ YA

As you all know, I’m gearing up to make my first short film this week. Filming begins on either Tuesday or Wednesday and on Friday morning I have a meeting with the Headteacher to read through and discuss the script and get him to sign off on it. That’ll be fun.

I suppose I’ve left this really late and should have got this all together over the summer, but I’ve picked up an obsession for filming equipment.

For those of you who are uninitiated, you might think that making short films just involves a camera. Nope! The most essential thing aside from the camera, in my opinion, is a tripod. If you don’t know what that is then it’s basically a big piece of equipment which you can attach the camera to which steadies it whilst filming. You can move it side-to-side, up and down, back and forth etc. It’s fun.

Maybe this is a little elaborate…

I fortunately do have a tripod, however one thing which I’m looking to buy is a body mount tripod. Now, the extent of my research into this was a half-hour Google sesh last night so admittedly I’m not awfully knowledgeable about these but I really want one. It’s essentially a vest/jacket thing which has a tripod that you can attach your camera to. I’m not sure how it deals with stabilization; when you’re filming on a tripod the vast majority of the time it’s stood still, so the footage won’t be shaky or moving like it would be if you were just holding the camera. However, because it’s attached to your body you’d use it for walking around shots which would presumably make the footage all jiggly. I’m not sure how it works, but I really want to find out.

Another sort of tripod I want is a ‘Jib’. A Jib is a crane, basically. If you’ve ever seen any BTS (behind the scenes) pictures of videos from movies then you’ll see that they attach cameras to big cranes to achieve high-angle shots which they wouldn’t normally get to do. Obviously I’m not buying a crane, but you can buy small handheld versions for relatively cheap which you attach the camera to. It’s like a big stick – you hold it and can film something which is several feet above you but still make it in-line with the camera. AWSUM.

Those are the things which I want, but don’t necessarily need. I could probably make do without either of those. One thing I do need is a microphone; the built-in microphone on my camera is actually really great, but it would probably be more effective to buy an external one and stick it on the top.

One last thing, which I both need and want, but is going to be a little harder because I have to make it…

You know in films when the camera will track an object smoothly?

Well, that’s because the camera is on a dolly rig. Big films will use big fancy ones with lots of different bars and rods but for those of us who are lower class teenagers living in Southern England with no major backing, we need to make do with a home-made version. There are several videos on Youtube explaining how to do this, but it comes down to buying a large rectangular plank of wood, attaching wheels to it and then attaching it to two long aluminium rods. To use an analogy, the wood is the train and the aluminium is the tracks. Here’s a photo:

There are of course a number of different variations on this; you can probably buy some actual tracks and attach wheels to the tripod, meaning you can seamlessly drive your camera around without any need for big planks of wood. I’m not sure whether one will be used on The Prefects because it’ll all be filmed at school and the logistics of either constructing one or bringing it in – either during or after the day is over – will be very difficult, which means I might have to make do with just making sure my hands are extremely steady.

I’m very sorry you had to read this. Things like this make me feel very giddy and excited because movies are beautiful and whilst the process of making one is gruelling, it’s fulfilling in the end.

Plus, having all this fancy equipment makes me feel so much more sophisticated. Yay.

I hope you all had a great weekend and have a great week at school!