Garrett Brown invented what would come to be called the Steadicam, a portable camera stabilizer.
Shortly after its creation, the Steadicam made its Oscar-winning debut in Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory. Shortly after, director Stanley Kubrick invited Brown to shoot some of the most iconic scenes in The Shining , such as the sequence of Danny riding his tricycle through the hotel hallways and the chase through the hedge maze at the end of the film. Brown would go on to shoot some of the greatest takes in cinema history, such as the staircase sequence in Rocky. The Steadicam effectively changed the course of cinematography forever.
Scene from 'The Shining'
Check out an excerpt from Brown's interview with www.nofilmschool.com .
“I was driven by the fact that here I am, this out-of-touch filmmaker 3,000 miles from Hollywood. I bought a big dolly and lights — old light bulbs — and made a studio. I was driven by a desire for something that didn’t exist; I wanted a way to make my camera handheld stable.”
One of the commercials I shot suggested that there might be a way to stabilize a handheld camera. We did some very technical commercials in Philadelphia in the 1970s, and bolivia phone number data one of the commercials had a camera hanging from a helicopter 30 feet below it on a pole. This camera was on a foam ball and a guy on roller skates was holding it, attached with bungee cords. The goal in this car commercial was to look at the cars passing by, look out the windows and circle around those cars, and if we made a mistake, the foam ball would just slide to the ground or bounce off the cars. It was a stupidly dangerous thing to do in retrospect, but the commercial was amazing. It was like looking back at what drones could do 40 years ago. When I looked at the results, they were stable as a church, and of course that was the result of the camera being on a pole. If you put a camera on a ladder and walk with it, in the angular direction it is totally stable. It takes a lot of work to turn the corner because of the inertia, but it is stable as hell.
Seeing things like this led me to experiments like attaching a camera to a pole. Even at six feet long, it’s extremely stable, but it’s only stable in pan and tilt. In the rotation axis, it’s terribly unstable, so add a T-bar to the back with some weights, and now it’s stable in all those axes just by good old Newtonian principles. I think in retrospect that not only did I have a great need to ditch the awful, heavy dolly, but I also had a mind receptive to the results of these experiments. Each one led to something else. Going back 40 years, that’s how invention happens, but in the middle of it, I was lurching, like something in a pinball machine, from one experiment to another. […]
Brown with the first version of the Steadicam
[…] Anyway, I could shoot 16mm, but not 35mm. I was told by potential licensors in LA that they loved the material, but forget it unless it’s 35mm. I had no way to put a 35mm camera on it. […]
[…] Well, first of all, I locked myself in a motel room to learn how something like this could behave, because it had to be very different from my previous stuff. It had to be mostly the weight of the camera and a very small amount of counterweight at a distance below it, and the Steadicam works by expanding the mass so that the center of gravity of the camera moves out from inside the camera, like a seesaw. Then you put a gimbal on the center of gravity – rings within rings that isolate it, angularly, like the gimbal used to isolate light bulbs on boats. It’s an old technology, but very useful.
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