Background information
Your desk setups, part 7: Andy’s alternative workplace
by David Lee
Steadicam: The revolution and its heirs
9.7.2018
Translation: machine translated
The camera close to the person, no rails, ropes or cranes. This is the Steadicam, a waistcoat with a pole construction that turned the film world upside down in 1974. A look at the history of cinema and a test of the further development of the Steadicam.
Garrett Brown revolutionised cinema overnight. Together with his wife, he came up with an invention in 1974 that completely turned filmmaking on its head and opened up completely new possibilities for cameramen. He recorded a demo video to show Hollywood what his new technology could do.
Fans of cinema know what it's all about. For most viewers, however, the video entitled "30 Impossible Shots" resembles everyday life in cinema and television. That's Garret Brown's fault. The man invented the Steadicam over 40 years ago. The harness with a balancing camera arm has made cinema dynamic and simplified camera movements so that they appear light and effortless.
The cinema before the Steadicam
Camera movements are nothing new. The first winner of the Oscar for Best Picture - the 1927 drama "Wings" - impressed the Academy not only with its story and acting, but also with the following scene.
In order to make this shot possible, the film crew had to recreate a club on a stage because the camera was big, clunky and the tracking shot planned by director William A. Wellmann was too impossible. Hence the obviously drawn window walls and doors.
In order for the shot to succeed, the film crew built a kind of cable car out of rails, suspended the camera and a cameraman from it and let them travel through the scene.
In the 1930 war drama "Nothing New in the West" there is a six-minute sequence in which French soldiers try to storm the German trenches and are mown down.
It is worth noting that the camera must have been carried by hand. This is particularly noticeable at second 21, where the cameraman has to cross a wide gap in the trench barricade. A few frames are missing so that it is not noticeable that the operator's otherwise steady step has been interrupted by the unevenness of the ground.
The cameramen of the time were not satisfied with this. They tinkered, tinkered and created illusions that are still impressive today. Camera angles, double exposures, splicing frames together and tricks with colour are just some of the techniques that production teams have used over the years to give viewers like you and me the most immersive film experience possible.
Then came Garrett Brown and his Steadicam.
The revolution to wear around your neck
In "30 impossible shots", the viewer sees very little that is exciting when it comes to entertainment. A woman runs around, a man swims. But it's the closeness to people and the mobility of the camera that makes the video. Until Brown's invention, it was not possible to get such shots without rails or crane constructions.
In the early 1970s, Brown was a cameraman for commercials and Sesame Street, but was fed up with the hassle of having to work with a track-based dolly or a crane.
Source: John Fry, flickr.com
His invention resembles a waistcoat or a belt construction with a crane arm attached to it. The camera is attached to the top of this crane. The batteries and the monitor hang below as a counterweight. The monitor is necessary because the camera's viewfinder is unusable when using the Steadicam. This is how the camera balances itself with a gimbal.
Since the whole construction is quite heavy, but the operator carries the weight like a rucksack worn on the chest, it doesn't wobble much. An operator can therefore move from A to B quite quickly and stably and still produce smooth shots. Deliberate movements are easy to make as the centre of mass is where the operator's hand is.
No wonder Hollywood quickly took notice. Among the first fans were directors Stanley Kubrick and John G. Avildsen.
The first film to be released with Steadicam footage was the 1976 spy thriller "Marathon Man".
However, one film caused a stir with one scene. "Rocky", only about two months after "Marathon Man".
Since Rocky is set in the US city of Philadelphia, director John G. Avildsen drew inspiration directly from Brown's original video and imitated the scene with the stairs. Garrett Brown was behind the camera both times. The director had thought that the shots from "30 Impossible Shots" were what he wanted to see in "Rocky".
And then came Stanley Kubrick. In his 1980 horror classic "The Shining", he filmed several scenes with the Steadicam - again with Garrett Brown behind the camera - including the eerie scene in which Danny (Danny Lloyd) rides his tricycle through the Overlook Hotel.
Even if this shot had been technologically possible with a dolly, the film crew would have had to hide the tracks of the dolly at great expense or remove them from the film afterwards. The Steadicam was simply easier.
Garrett Brown has never stopped tinkering with cameras, inventing camera rigs for sporting events and further developing the Steadicam. He recently corrected the pendulum effect of the gimbal, making the Steadicam much easier to use. The Steadicam M1 Volt eliminates the last oscillation and balances itself. The effect: the operator has to concentrate less on the balance and can focus fully on navigation and the image.
The cinema with Steadicam
Even though the Steadicam technology is over 40 years old, it is still in use. It has even managed to find its very own niche in the camera industry. No other camera rig makes long takes and one-shot scenes easier to master than the Steadicam.
Firstly, there's the fight scene in "The Protector" starring Tony Jaa, which delivers four minutes of action without being cut once.
Okay, maybe there's a cut or two in there, as stuntman Rustic Bodomov explains, a good editing technique to use with Steadicam shots is the so-called whip pan, in which the camera rotates 180 degrees very quickly.
But these are by no means all the uses of the Steadicam. According to the film encyclopaedia IMDB, Garrett Brown has employed his Steadicam in 71 films, and he is not the only one to work with a waistcoat and crane arm on sets around the world.
Of course, the Steadicam has been used in many films.
Of course, the directors, cameramen and camerawomen of this world have not missed the opportunity to play with the camera. This is how, among other things, the scene from the 1997 sci-fi film "Contact" came about, in which the entire scene - physically impossible - takes place in a mirror.
Gimbals: the heirs of the Steadicam
The development of the moving camera is far from over with the Steadicam. To this day, engineers and others - Garrett Brown himself came to fame as Folk Singer - are still working on even smaller rigs, even more sophisticated technologies and playing around with them to create even more impossible shots.
Probably the most famous heir to the Steadicam is the gimbal, not to be confused with gimbal technology. Gimbals, the objects, are rigs that resemble a Steadicam but do not require a waistcoat. They can be held in the hand and are also designed to stabilise shots. Gimbals are currently very popular, especially with the ever-improving cameras built into smartphones, but also thanks to action cameras such as the GoPro.
So, that's it. I hope that the development of camera rigs continues, because employees with gimbals may take some getting used to, but the results speak for themselves. And you, stay curious and try something out. <p
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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