The Groucho Walk

Another little tid-bit I picked up at the Videomaker conference last week.

If you need to walk and film at the same time and don't have access to a truck or any kind of stabilizer. Walk like Groucho Marx. The exaggerated walk helps steady the shot.

I looked for an example of this on the web for you folks who are too young to remember a Marx Brothers film. No luck. I did find a few references to this style of walking for people in law enforcement or the military who are shooting a gun. It does the same thing....keeps your upper body stable.

Essentially, keep your knees bent and your torso a little lower to the ground. Then walk. It looks weird but it works. I've included another tutorial from Videomaker today describing some other techniques for keeping your camera steady.



While searching for the Groucho Walk, I did spend a lot of time reading about Groucho Marx and watching some clips of his movies. It was a fun search. I'll leave you with a few quotes:

“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.”

“If you've heard this story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.”

“I was going to thrash them within an inch of their lives, but I didn't have a tape measure”

“If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you.”

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

[Image captured at http://www.fredonia.edu/department/english/shokoff/Filmhome.htm]
[Quotes gathered from ThinkExist.com: http://thinkexist.com/quotes/Groucho_Marx/]

Poor Man's SteadyCam

SteadyCams are rigs that help keep a video camera steady even while the cameraman is moving. I found this site last year while I was looking for an alternative to the expensive units that were available. I never constructed one and it slipped my mind until the other day when I was writing about the camera technique that Andy Ihnatko' used on one of his YouTube videos.

A comment on his website mentioned the site I originally found, $14 SteadyCam, and I went back and looked it over again. If you are looking for a inexpensive alternative to a store bought unit that costs several hundred of dollar or more, this might be the way to go.

I stumbled across this YouTube video of some young men building a steadycam in their garage. It looks pretty close to the one from the $14 SteadyCam site, so I included it here. It also has some footage taken with and without the steadycam for comparison.




[Image: Captured at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam/]

One man, One camera, One long arm

I was watching a piece by Andy Ihnatko the other day and I enjoyed the video, he is a funny guy, but what really caught my eye was his camera technique. He was able to pan the camera from each side with out any apparent movement from his arms while he was walking through Central Park. I figured he either has really long, ape like arms or was using some kind of rig. I wasn't the only one who was curious and there were several comments asking how he did it. He responded:

I used the same tabletop telescoping tripod that I used for the first video, and held the thing as a stick. Shooting that way is a lot of fun; I shot a third video in which I slowly spun in place and that was a cool effect (me rock-solid, Central Park swooshing behind me nonstop). But I got a bit dizzy doing it, and watching it later.

When I got back home I was happy to find that I had all the raw materials necessary to build a better version of this stick. I just broke apart another tabletop tripod ($5 from the MIT Flea), liberated the metal adjustable tripod head from it, and screwed it into a monopod. Works a treat, gives me a lot more range, and the finished stick looks as though I have an actual budget for these things.

I once saw an episode of Survivorman, where they drop Les Stroud into the middle of nowhere with some supplies and a few video cameras. Sometimes he was walking along holding his camera hooked to his tripod (I think) which let him get the camera little further from his face and shoot while he walked. I didn't really think about it much until I saw the Ihnatko footage and it got me to thinking that this would be an interesting addition to my bag of tricks.

Cool! I'm going to be experimenting with this soon. Anybody know a site that discusses using a video camera this way?

[Image: Captured from "Andy Ihnatko 02 "The Kindle Constitutional"; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaY91FqM40E&eurl=http://ihnatko.com/]