rig breakdown

Counterbalanced guitar rig with auto-tilt.

The goal was to rig the camera to the end of the guitar to see the tuning knobs and the neck. We couldn’t drill into the guitar at all which left very limited options for rigging. Couldn’t bite onto anything on the neck because we’d see the clamp.

To rig a shot like this traditionally you would rig a few points off the neck or body of the guitar to the camera and support the weight of the camera. This makes it hard to operate the shot because you need to support the camera and awkwardly maintain the angle as the guitar moves around. Controlling the movement of the guitar is tough in this instance.

For this rig we created an inner ring and an outer ring both built out of speedrail. Almost like a dumb version of a gimbal with no motors. The inner ring was free to pivot on the x axis to allow the camera to tilt up and down independent of the rig’s vertical movement. This meant that as the rig got higher, the camera would tilt down. If the rig got lower the camera would tilt up. The tilt was in relation to the angle of the guitar - it wasn’t something the operator had to control.

You could raise and lower the rig by holding onto the outer ring without having to worry about whether you were aiming the camera straight down the neck of the guitar - it did it for you.

Ran a pulley from the top of our rig up and over to some counterbalance to make up and down movement effortless.