Getting a Grip

The first time I made an animated film I was aghast to get the rushes back (It was on film, I had to wait weeks before I could see what I'd done, talk about PATIENCE!) and found that the tripod I had used was sadly deficient and the shots waved around in the air like they just didn't care.

They're STILL cool!

That was a hot lyric in those days, okay?

Well, having shot three hundred irrevocable feet of it, I just had to grin and bear it, after all, what could be done? I like to think, now, that it adds an edgy, sinister feel to the production, and takes the audience's eye off the (obviously) cardboard scenery.  Also, I was fifteen and about to discover boys, so you could say I was on a timescale!

It's the second thing you learn in movie making of any kind, isn't it? - after "The bigger glass bit points forward" - Lock your tripod off, if you must pan, pan slowly AND LEAVE THE ZOOM LENS ALONE!

Then you watch Shameless or that thing with Matt Damon and they do none of that and THEY seem to get away with it.   ...actually, that thing with Matt Damon doesn't get away with it; bad example.

Then you can't bear to look at a screen unless the camera is up to something frightfully clever.

You keep the Manfrotto catalogue under your mattress.  (It's an Italian grip-kit manufacturer. Get your mind out of the gutter!)

Ahhh.  Smooth Camera Movement: The stuff of legend

You ache, you pine for Disney's ACES (Automatic Camera Effects System) The computer for it can HAVE the spare room, dammit!

You begin experimenting with roller skates, shopping trolleys and guillotines, the office type not the french revolutionary tool; and your eye for static shot composition slowly withers in a box alongside Battleship and Pac Man and other childish things.

I have to confess, having striven these past twenty years to get my grubby paws on every tripod under the sun, from a 1929 wood and chrome "tank carrier" to a wafer thin gooseneck bendy thing which has yet to find it's place in the world, it occurred to me this afternoon that I seem to be on a crussade to avoid using a tripod for anything on Firebird.

This current shot involves a heath robinson affair composed of parts of a pre-historic B+Q drill-press that I picked up in a charity shop over a thousand years ago.

It's been sitting in a cupboard all this time waiting for me to work out what I can use it for.  It certainly won't hold any modern drill, but it does have this really good incremental pedestal motion.  It can be adjusted for tension and it has a nice long lever so that it can make those precise and microscopic changes in position I need to make my camera  - finally one that holds completely steady between one frame and the next - appear to do something frightfully clever.