News

July 5th, 2010

Using Cinevate rails/dollies.

So back to the topic of Shortfilm equipment we used on the live-action short, the other types of dollies we used came from another company, Cinevate. Thanks to Dennis Wood/Hubert Den Draak from Cinevate, we used both their rails and their Dolly-Ballare. Their rails are seriously strong, and could hold the camera, plus adaptor, ARRI lenses, mattebox, ff, etc with no problem.

Once again with the 3D help of my friends Edward Robbins/Eduardo Martin in providing models/sets, my DP Tiffany Taira and I used 3D animatics to figure out what sorts of shots we were going to use, and why were they important that we used a dolly move. Having dollie/track moves really adds a bit of production value to any film as long as it’s not overdone. As I mentioned before, moving the camera can make things more distracting than beneficial except for when they serve a purpose. This became even more important when working with kids because setting up dolly/tracking shots was time consuming and we only had 7 hours a day to get over 15 setups completed…so at one point we need to know exactly which moments in the short are we going to need a camera move and why.

In some of the shots we used the Cinevate rails I had previously purchased on my own about a year earlier. Here you can see how they were used, including tests and animatics.

Then for some key scenes, we needed a much longer, stronger and more stable dolly but our budget didn’t give us the flexibility of purchasing equipment. So Dennis/Cinevate helped us out for a weekend to get some shots we needed. We used their Dolly-Ballare. We put it together the previous week to the shot, and by Saturday/Sunday we were using it and getting great stuff with it.

Here below are a couple of production photos taken by my friend Bob Roden who wrote the story and was also script supervisor on the set. On the pictures are DP Tiffany Taira, Camera operator Jason Kim and camera assistant Grace Thompson.

For those looking into live-action independent shorts, this is another one of those very affordable/well constructed tools I’d love to recommend. Thanks again to Dennis/Hubert for their help on our short. Very very appreciated.

We are currently finishing editing the short, and learning great deals through it. It’s been a ton of work. It really is true that while this is really fun, is also really hard. So having some key people help us in the process has been great.

Carlos.