Production Skills - Grips + Smoke Machine

We had a tutorial on a smoke machine and how to use it in the correctly, through this lesson we learned that if you must cover the smoke detectors when using this machine indoors. The machine does heat up to high temperatures and care should be taken when using it. When using this machine you should never point it at anybody, it is mostly water vapor, but can injure people by getting in their eyes or throat. The first thing we did with the smoke machine was just spraying it so we could understand the density of the smoke and then we got the camera out and started to experiment with some of the effects we could do with it. We experimented with the camera alongside the smoke machine to create a graveyard effect. 



A camera dolly is a specialised piece of equipment designed to create smooth camera movements. The camera is mounted to the dolly and the camera operator and focus puller/camera assistant usually but not always ride on the dolly to operate. The camera dolly may be used as a shooting platform on any surface but is often raised onto a track, this creates a smooth movement, a dolly shot. Most professional film studio dollies have a hydraulic jib arm that raises or lowers the camera on the vertical axis.  Dolly moves may also be executed without track, giving more freedom and with it, a higher degree of difficulty. These may be done on the existing surface or on an overlay designed for dolly movement.


A tripod is a portable three-legged frame, it is used as a platform for supporting the weight and maintaining the stability of some other object, usually a camera. A tripod provides stability. The positioning of the three legs away from the vertical center allows the tripod better leverage for resisting lateral forces.


Steadicam is a camera stabilizer mount for cameras that isolates it from the movement. It creates a smooth shot,  when moving quickly and over uneven surfaces. The Steadicam was invented by Garrett Brown and was introduced in 1975.  The operator wears a harness which is attached to an iso-elastic arm. This is connected by a multiaxis and ultra-low friction gimbal to the Steadicam armature which has the camera mounted at one end and a counterbalance weight at the other. The Steadicam stays upright, by simply making the bottom slightly heavier than the top, pivoting at the gimbal. This leaves the center of gravity of the whole rig, however heavy it may be, exactly at the operator's fingertip, allowing deft and finite control of the whole system with the lightest of touches on the gimbal. The freely pivoting armature adds additional stabilization to the photographed image, and makes the weight of the counterbalance assembly acceptable by allowing the body harness to support it. When the armature is correctly adjusted, the operator is able to remove their hands from the Steadicam entirely and have the camera stay in place. For low-angle shots, the camera/sled armature can be rotated vertically, putting the camera on the bottom, and the sled on the top. This is referred to as "low mode" operation.

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