Steadicam
The term steadicam has several senses:
- As used by specialists when speaking carefully, it refers to a mount for a motion-picture camera, which mechanically isolates the movement of the camera from that of the operator, providing a very smooth shot even when the operator is moving quickly over an uneven surface.
- Many familiar with the general concept either use it to refer to the combined assembly of mount and camera, or don't realize the units are separable and likely to be bought separately.
- With a capital S and C, it is a registered trademark for certain steadicams.
For the remainder of this article, "steadicam" will be used in sense 1 above.
Purpose
A tripod or other mount normally supports a motion-picture camera. However, when supported by its operator alone, in what is described as "hand-held" camera work, the projected image resulting normally shows the effects of even small body movements of the operator, even while he or she is standing still. Hand-held footage has traditionally been considered suitable mostly for live-action unrehearsable footage or as a special effect to produce a similar effect, say in a fight or battle scene. A director who wants steady images that do not impose on the audience or the story most often mounts the camera on a dolly -- that is, a wheeled camera mount that runs on tracks or levelled boards. The limitations of time to level the surfaces or lay a levelled track and the subsequent need to avoid including the said track in the shot, are significant problems. Before steadicams, the only alternative to avoiding this was to use a moving hand-held camera.
A steadicam mounts the camera to the operator's body and provides him or her with a freedom of movement comparable to a hand-held camera. The steadicam's armature absorbs the jerks, bumps, and other small movements of the operator, while smoothly following the broad movements needed to cover any given scene.
How It Works
The steadicam consists of a harness, worn by the operator, attached to an iso-elastic arm. This is in turn connected by a gimbal to the steadicam armature which has the camera mounted at one end and a counterbalance weight at the other. The counterbalance usually includes the battery pack and a monitor. (The monitor substitutes for the camera's viewfinder, since the range of motion of the camera relative to the operator makes the camera's own viewfinder unusable.)
The combined weight of the counterbalance and camera means that the armature bears a relatively high inertial mass which will not be easily moved by small body movements from the operator. The freely pivoting armature - not the harness itself - accounts for most of the stabilisation of the photographed image. Shaky images mostly result from a change of angle, not a translation of camera position.
Introduction of the Steadicam
The steadicam was invented in the 1970s by Garrett Brown. It was feared that the novel and unusually smooth but free moving imagery would cause discomfort in audiences, so it was used in a test case in what was expected to be a little-seen film: Rocky (1976).
Filmography
Today the steadicam is a standard piece of film-making equipment, used in many productions. However, they have been used to great effect in some notable movies including:
- The opening tracking shot in Goodfellas (1990)
- The tracking shot of the little boy on his tricycle in The Shining (1977)
- The smart guns used by the marines in Aliens (1986), which were actually steadicams with the sleds removed and machine guns fitted to them.
- Russian Ark (2002), in which the entire movie consists of one uninterrupted 90-minute steadicam shot, with the camera following the principal character as he wanders through the Hermitage, the palatial museum in St Petersburg.
- Before Sunset (2004) is an example of the use of steadicams in a modern independent film production, featuring 7-8 minute shots of its two main characters strolling down Parisian streets.
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