Roll 'Em!

Jim Stinson
January 2005

Without dynamic moving shots, videos can look, well, old-fashioned. Hand-holding is fine, but without a Steadicam, the results lack the creamy smoothness of dolly shots. Professional dollies (like the Microdolly Hollywood system) are affordable for small enterprises, but you can also make fluid moving shots with just about anything that rolls on wheels.

The classic guerrilla dollies are wheelchairs and shopping carts. Shopping carts are usually no good, because, face it, you have to steal one to use it. Furthermore, after banging around in a supermarket parking lot, the cart wheels are rarely good enough for smooth moves. The four swiveling wheels are tough to control on any kind of slant and one of the four is sure to rattle. Let's just forget about shopping carts, but it does illustrate an important point: potential dollies are everywhere.

Another option is an industrial cart. They're great because they're sturdy, have push bars and large, often pneumatic wheels for smooth rolling. Some examples of industrial cards include food service carts, library carts, factory parts carts, warehouse carts; a great many commercial environments have suitable rolling stock just waiting for you to use.

If you're an entry-level professional, you might want to invest in a cart of your own. When not rolling along making shots, they're invaluable for hauling equipment around a location. When buying a cart, look for these essentials:

• Collapsibility: unless you're working out of a maxivan, you'll need to fold it for travel.
• Strength: fold-up equipment must be stronger, to maintain rigidity.
• Versatility: look for a model with a removable top shelf/platform, so you can stand on the lower one as you shoot.
• Two-wheel steer: Swivel-front and fixed-rear casters make controlling the unit much easier.

While industrial carts are almost always better than shopping carts, they do have small hard wheels that work best only on really smooth surfaces. Even with a large cart, a tripod may be impractical, so bone up on your hand-holding techniques. Skate, snow and surf boards might be other options, but they can definitely be dangerous, to you and your camcorder.

Wheelchairs are a truly remarkable shooting platform. Besides having huge wheels to minimize small pavement irregularities, they collapse to fit a car trunk or back seat and have a built-in operator's seat. The safe and stable platform is ideal for the videographer, who can leave the pushing, guiding, and watching-out to a dolly grip. While new wheel chairs are outrageously expensive, second-hand chairs are surprisingly easy to find.

In the old days, wheelchairs allowed only low camera angles because the eye of the seated operator was no more than 48 inches off the deck. The external LCD screens found on all modern camcorders change all that. By swinging and rotating the screen, you can hold the camera at any height your arms can reach.

Wheelchair shooting can work well with a monopod as an accessory. For a higher angle, place the foot on the seat between your legs, extend the column to taste, tilt the view screen to see what you're shooting and twist the monopod to pan. You can even tilt enough to make running composition corrections, although the "tilt" is technically a shallow arc. By reversing the setup, you can make rolling shots with the lens just inches off the ground. If we could have only one moving platform, a wheelchair would be our choice.

On an industrial shoot, you can sometimes use big rolling stock like electric carts or working ATVs. I once pulled off a spiffy crane shot from a pallet on the prongs of a forklift (secured to the machine with a war-surplus web belt). Units like cherry pickers and such can be useful for bird's eye angles, but their motion is usually too jerky for crane shots.

People movers, on the other hand, are smooth as a butter pat on a hot griddle. All you need is good hand-held technique. Escalators are great for massive crane shots and you can find them in many locations, such as in hotels, malls, department stores, terminals and garages. The only downside to escalators is that you are limited by location and the fact that they are very slow. You can use the same gag with airport-style beltways for dollies. Still, you are probably going to have a hard time hiding the fact that you are in an airport.

Glass elevators can be very dramatic, whether in multi-story atriums or on the outside of tall buildings. Because the windows use very thick glass, you can minimize the appearance of scratches and dirt by keeping your camera lens as close as possible without touching. If you have manual focus, set it to infinity to minimize imperfections. A circular polarizer can also help by dialing out reflections.

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