rig breakdown

Indoor bus rig. The DP requested a slow push-in for the intro of the scene, starting at the front of the bus and moving to the middle, ending with a medium shot of our three characters. I wanted to build a rig that would be invisible from the camera's perspective, but more importantly, I wanted to give the DP the ability to easily position the camera and adjust angles. We all know how challenging it can be to set up cameras in the confined spaces of an indoor bus scene.

A few days before the shoot, I took all the measurements of the bus. However, at the last minute, the production decided to use a different bus, which I only discovered on the morning of the shoot. I had to adapt several elements of the rig that didn’t fit as planned, but we managed to make it work. It was an extremely tight fit, with some parts of the rig just millimeters away from scratching the bus ceiling.

The rig consisted of two traveling track rails mounted in the luggage compartment and secured with ratchet clamps. I used two sets of skate wheels linked with two 50mm pipes cut to length. A standard Euromount plate was attached to the pipes to mount a 120cm Proaim slider and a Cartoni Lambda 25.

This rig worked very well on smooth roads, but when the bus hit bumps, the camera began to shake fairly quickly. I think it would be perfect with a gimbal and a vibration isolator but that wasn't an option for us at the time.