The Importance of Adjustability

This shoot happened over 3 days. Day 1 we were all in one location doing a mix of mainly car rigs and a little lighting close to where we were rigging. This is important because I was able to stay in one place and supervise the car rigging most of the time but also hop over into lighting mode. Being able to supervise a bunch of vehicle rigs is always a good thing even with a stellar crew.

Day 2 we were at one location but it was a massive exterior property. We were shooting half way up a hill and vehicle rigging happened at the bottom of the hill next to the grip trailer. I was on set managing the lighting needs with our small stakebed package and finalizing camera placement when the rigged cars got up to us. This is a case where you need to work with a crew you really trust. A few key things come to mind:

1. Make sure you have someone you trust leading the rigging. Someone you’ve worked with plenty of times before. Someone who knows car rigging inside and out

2. Before you split off from them and head to set go over all the rig placements and take measurements. Make sure they have an idea of camera positioning and rigging possibilities.

3. Prep work in this case is super important. I like to go over all the rigged camera frames with the DP before the shoot. We’ll Artemis all the frames and I’ll take some rough measurements. Share the frames and measurements with your rigging lead (in the commercial world this is usually just another grip you really trust. Don’t usually have the luxury of a Key Rigging Grip)

4. Create rigs with built in adjustability. We all know how it goes. DP signs off on an Artemis frame shot on their iPhone. The rigged vehicle gets to set and the shot would be so much better if the camera was 2” to the left and a 1/2” higher. We can try and plan for these scenarios by building rig structures that allow for this kind of adjustability. More on this below.

With all that being said, know that anything can also change on the day.

We built for adjustability on this job with Mod Truss. If you imagine, for a second, that you hold a camera in 3D space close to a vehicle and then triangulate off the camera to the vehicle with points, you’re pretty much locked into that position. Moving positions would require you to loosen all of those points, shift the camera position, hold the camera in place, and then reattach and tighten all your points without the camera shifting. This isn’t efficient. There are easier ways to make a number of things in that scenario work so much better. What I like to do, if I can, is build a system that allows for left and right, up and down, and swing adjustability. In many instances on this job I instructed my car riggers to build me a runner along the bottom side of the vehicle made out of Mod Truss with pipe that ran the length. This allowed us to slide the camera position up and down the vehicle. We’d then attach a vertical pipe to the pipe that runs horizontally along the Mod Truss. This vertical pipe could run up and down the entire length of the truss. This vertical pipe acted as our camera mounting structure. L bracket off that, a little triangulation, and you’re good to go. Even for reframing! All you needed to do was triangulate the top of that vertical pipe rigged off the Mod Truss to the roof of the vehicle.

When the vehicle arrived on set and the camera was 2” too far to the rear of the car it was really easy to pop the suctions on the roof for the vertical triangulation, loosed the hollander at the bottom of that vertical, and slide it down the truss. This doesn’t work with only truss either. You can implement this same sort of idea with just pipe. Photos below to visualize what I’m describing with the truss runner and vertical pipe.

We ended up keeping 4 grips down in the car rigging station and I had 4 grips up on set with me. Worked beautifully and no large changes were needed in terms of rig placement. Huge shout out to the crew for holding down the fort and really knowing what they were doing. Had an S tier team and they made me look good.