VaricamLT: Shooting a 10 minute single take short with LT

CharlesPapert

CharlesPapert

Director of Photography
Thought you folks might like to see our setup for today's shoot, a ten+ minute continuous shot that takes place an art gallery.

My regular Steadicam operator, Neal Bryant (Instagram: studlycam) is doing a fantastic job as always. We've had two rehearsal sessions so far and today is the big day. I had suggested to him that we set him up with a lightweight rig for the rehearsals to save his energy (especially as we lead up to the real takes today); I put together a little setup with my A7S, a Decimator MD-HX to convert HDMI to SDI and a Connex Mini and he borrowed a prototype Arrow rig from Tiffen (pretty nifty little sled that separates into two spars for easy travel with a 20 lb payload). The LT (courtesy of Hot Rod Camera) is stripped to minimal as possible, with a Teradek 2000, lockit, audio receiver (for scratch track) and Preston FIZ motor driver and motor. Theoretically we could have gone with a prime and a lighter mattebox than the O-box, but I don't happen to own those (this is a friend's short film so I tried to keep it all in-house)! The LT configuration is probably a bit under 20 lbs on Neal's M1 Steadicam.

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Shoot went beautifully. The short is headed to festivals once complete, which tends to mean it can't go online for a given period of time. LT worked very well for us, as I've come to expect from the Varicam. I was actually due to shoot on the Amira, but my gaffer was concerned that we might be fighting for exposure and would have to push the camera to at least 1280 ISO, so the Varicam was a natural choice as it has been for my last two series.
 
Well, while we're showing Steadicam setups from one take short flims, here is my setup from a five minute one-take short film we filmed for a festival a few weeks ago. Festival showing is on Wednesday so should have it online not too long after that. Think the setup was around 20 lbs on the top. We had the O'Connor O'Box on set, but I didn't want to use a matte box because I wanted to keep the footprint of the setup small so I could fit between doorways and such.

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CharlesPapert said:
Thought you folks might like to see our setup for today's shoot, a ten+ minute continuous shot that takes place an art gallery.

My regular Steadicam operator, Neal Bryant (Instagram: studlycam) is doing a fantastic job as always. We've had two rehearsal sessions so far and today is the big day. I had suggested to him that we set him up with a lightweight rig for the rehearsals to save his energy (especially as we lead up to the real takes today); I put together a little setup with my A7S, a Decimator MD-HX to convert HDMI to SDI and a Connex Mini and he borrowed a prototype Arrow rig from Tiffen (pretty nifty little sled that separates into two spars for easy travel with a 20 lb payload). The LT (courtesy of Hot Rod Camera) is stripped to minimal as possible, with a Teradek 2000, lockit, audio receiver (for scratch track) and Preston FIZ motor driver and motor. Theoretically we could have gone with a prime and a lighter mattebox than the O-box, but I don't happen to own those (this is a friend's short film so I tried to keep it all in-house)! The LT configuration is probably a bit under 20 lbs on Neal's M1 Steadicam.
Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing this and for all your other posts. Appreciate your professionalism and generosity. Look forward to seeing how the short turned out.

Additionally, listening to your experience and perspective on the recent episode of the Cinematography Podcast was super useful.
 
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