Of Steadicams And Skycams
Filmmakers have long sought the means to add a little kinetic energy to their moving images
Director Stanley Kubrick couldn’t figure it out. In 1974 a company named the Cinema Products Corporation sent him a reel of film, all shots that seemed beyond the capacity of the day’s filmmaking equipment.
The camera moved fluidly after a man who was running around a golf course and followed a woman as she jogged up and down a wide stone stairway—without the bumping and jiggling characteristic of handheld footage. Kubrick also knew he wasn’t seeing a simple dolly shot, where the camera is attached to a wheeled platform and moves along a set of metal tracks.
“Mystery stabilizer was spectacular,” Kubrick telexed Cinema Products, “and you can count on me as a customer. It should revolutionize the way films are shot. If you are really concerned about protecting its design before you fully patent it, I suggest you delete the two occasions on the reel where the shadow on the ground gives the skilled counterintelligence photo interpreter a fairly close representation of a man holding a pole with one hand, with something or other at the bottom of the pole which appears to be slowly moving.”
The telex landed like a thunderbolt. “Of course we were horrified,” says Garrett Brown, who had not yet patented the device. “We rushed in, looked at the reel again, and clipped out those 14 frames.”
In a few years Brown joined Kubrick on the set of The Shining (1980), using his newly dubbed Steadicam to create dazzlingly fluid moving shots. Although Kubrick had guessed wrong about how Brown’s gadget worked, he correctly anticipated its effect on moving pictures.
Early filmmakers didn’t move their cameras. Mounted on sturdy wooden tripods without movable heads, the cameras simply captured what passed in front of their lenses. Pioneering directors later began cautiously swiveling the camera up and down in a “tilt,” or in the horizontal “pan.” Director Edwin S. Porter’s landmark 1903 short The Great Train Robbery contained one of the first pans. Soon filmmakers were mounting their cameras on cars and trains to shoot moving footage. But these “tracking” shots tended to be shaky and bouncy and were mostly limited to outdoor work.
David Wark (D. W.) Griffith, one of modern film’s founding fathers, is best known for his 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation . He popularized many new techniques such as the close-up and the fade. He also moved his camera to heighten the impression of three-dimensionality. In 1916 Griffith shot his ambitious Intolerance . For a sequence in ancient Babylonia, he built an outdoor set with walls 100 feet high, adorned with huge statues of trumpeting elephants. Eager to show off his magnificent creation, Griffith imagined a shot that would start high up to take in the full spectacle and then drop low and close to observe the inhabitants.
To achieve this effect, Griffith built a huge camera tower set on four trucks, which rolled on tracks, complete with an elevator that could raise and lower its camera platform. The structure was so precisely balanced that a half-dozen men could push it into motion as the camera platform sank on its elevator. “It was a beautiful piece of mechanism constructed by backstage experts who had been ‘flying’ whole sets for years, building revolving stages, and installing rising and falling orchestra pits as a matter of routine,” remembered Karl Brown, who served as assistant to Griffith’s great cameraman, Billy Bitzer. The shot was spectacular—but Intolerance , for all its ambitions, was a flop.
Director Edgar G. Ulmer claimed credit for helping to create the modern camera dolly. Later known for such low-budget noir films as Detour (1945) and the Boris Karloff/Bela Lugosi creeper The Black Cat (1934), Ulmer recalled that inspiration came in 1924, while he was working for director F. W. Murnau in Berlin on The Last Laugh , the story of a hotel doorman (Emil Jannings) who is demoted to washroom attendant. Murnau wanted a shot of Jannings’s expressive face as he staggered across a Berlin street. One evening, as Ulmer wrestled with the mechanics of creating such a shot, he and Ulmer walked past a woman pushing a baby carriage.
“What’s going to stop us from putting the camera on a buggy?” Ulmer remembered asking. Forty-six years later he told interviewer Peter Bogdanovich that “We tried and tried, and we built the first dolly.” (In fact, back in 1914 the Italian film Cabiria had used tracking shots, a technique known for a time as “ Cabiria movement.”) Murnau went on to create several tracking shots in The Last Laugh , moving with Jannings through Berlin’s sidewalks and streets, gliding through the hotel’s restaurant, and reviewing a row of hotel employees, their hands outstretched as they waited for tips.
Murnau’s first American film, Sunrise (1927), was ambitious and inventive—“the most important picture in the history of the movies,” as Robert Sherwood later wrote in Life magazine. Murnau built complex sets, used forced perspective, and employed the moving camera, most notably in a scene where a country boy, infatuated with a loose city woman, enters a swamp for an illicit rendezvous. Murnau mounted his camera on a rail attached to the set’s ceiling so that it could follow his protagonist’s zigzagging progress, a trick he had picked up from cameraman Carl Hoffman, who had photographed Faust (1926) for him in Germany. “We built a railway line in the roof, suspended a little platform from it, which could be raised or lowered,” remembered Charles Rosher, Murnau’s director of photography on Sunrise .
The introduction of synchronized sound in the movies, ushering in the era of the talkies, put the brakes on camera freedom. Awkward soundproof boxes began encasing cameras, and onscreen action centered on microphones hidden in flower arrangements and other props. The development of movable microphone booms began to lift such restrictions, but camera movement in Hollywood films was generally limited to modest movements by cranes and dollies, which had evolved into heavy wheeled platforms on rails moved by “dolly grips.” In the 1930s and 1940s, choreographer Busby Berkeley orchestrated elaborate crane shots for some of his musical numbers, but such long takes remained difficult to set up and film.
Gone with the Wind (1939) features a famous crane shot that starts in close on Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) as she frantically searches for a doctor among the Confederate wounded in Atlanta, then slowly moves up and away, revealing a grisly panorama of the dead and dying, and ends behind a tattered Confederate flag atop a flagpole. No movie crane could reach that high, so the production rented a construction crane, but the machine started and stopped with such a lurch that the crew had to build an immense concrete ramp, on which the big machine could be slid without jarring while the crane swung the camera 90 feet into the air.
Alfred Hitchcock, a master of film editing, also knew how to wring dramatic effect out of a moving camera. In his British film Young and Innocent (1937), he used a movie crane to move in slowly on a dance band, zeroing in on the drummer, whose twitching eyes reveal him as the murderer sought by the film’s leads. In Notorious (1946), he constructed tall wooden scaffolding for filming a party scene from high above the floor and then slowly moved the camera to a tight close-up of the key in Ingrid Bergman’s clenched hand. For Hitchcock the shot served more than just an opportunity to show off fancy camerawork—it proved integral to the storyline. “In Notorious that sweeping movement of the camera is making a statement,” Hitchcock told fellow director François Truffaut. “There’s a large reception being held in his house, but there is a drama here which no one is aware of, and at the core of that drama is this tiny object, this key.”
Orson Welles opened his 1958 film Touch of Evil with one of the most famous moving camera shots in cinema history, beginning with a close-up of hands setting a bomb, passing to their shadowy owner planting it in a white convertible, and then pulling back as a couple gets in the car and drives obliviously away. Zigging, zagging, and swooping through the streets of the seedy border town where the action takes place, the camera introduces the characters played by Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh and swings around town to intercept the car again as it slows at the crossing between the United States and Mexico before exploding—a move of breathtaking audacity that sets up the rest of the movie.
To make that shot, Welles used a wheel-mounted Chapman crane, whose long and marvelously balanced arm could move the camera with relative fluidity. Invented by Ralph Chapman in the late 1940s, the crane became a mainstay for moving camera shots. Its smooth-acting, hydraulically operated arm moved the camera silently from its mount atop a truck chassis. The machine’s imposing bulk caused the actor playing the border guard in Touch of Evil to botch take after take near the end of the shot. “He’d see this great complex of cars and lights and Chapmain [sic] booms bearing down on him from three blocks away, and they’d get closer and finally there they would all be, and he would blow his line,” remembered Heston. “Orson said, ‘Look, I don’t care what you say, just move your lips, we can dub it in later. Don’t just put your face in your hands and say, “Oh my God,
I’m sorry.”’”
In the early 1970s cameraman Garrett Brown could see that while dollies, cranes, and handheld cameras were important, they still had serious limitations. Today, at age 65, he stands a lanky six feet six inches, and his resonant voice is familiar to those who have heard his voice-overs for Molson beer and American Express radio commercials. Recently, in his workshop on the second story of a restored barn at his country home outside Philadelphia, he related the Steadicam’s history while sitting at a table strewn with tools and gizmos. On one wall hangs a poster from the 1998 film Bulworth , for which Brown ran the Steadicam, and
a large photo of a much younger Brown testing the first factory-made Steadicam prototype. Equipment racks in the next room contain parts from generations of Steadicams, the latest represented by a new G70 arm from the top-of-the-line Ultra2 model, which lies across a chair.
A onetime folksinger and former Volkswagen salesman, Brown entered the advertising field in 1965 at a friend’s suggestion, eventually earning the top production job at a Philadelphia firm. His knack for commercial making led him to buy a barnful of used equipment and start his own company within a few years. “I’m a moving camera junkie,” he says. “Part of it has to do with the three-dimensionality of it—the fact that that medium comes alive when you move.”
For $300 Brown had purchased an 800-pound camera dolly and some 30 feet of track. The equipment was heavy, clumsy, and difficult to set up and keep level, but no better way of securing smooth moving shots existed. “In hindsight it was fortunate that I came face to face with something huge that was missing in the movie business,” Brown recalls. He set out to liberate his camera from the dolly, yet insulate it from the thousand natural shocks that make handheld photography so jittery. “It did seem plausible to me that you could disconnect the camera from the moving human, that you could preserve our amazing ambulatory abilities but you could ignore stairs and doorsills and bumps and rough ground outdoors.”
He first tried mounting the camera on the end of a horizontal aluminum beam, with a T-bar counterweight at the other end and a handle attached at the center of gravity. The next version contained a second bar to create a more stable parallelogram form, and he replaced the weights on this “walking crane” with a gyroscope. A fiber-optic cable ran from the camera’s viewfinder to Brown’s eye, where a headband held it in place. He kept his other eye clear so he could navigate around obstacles as he filmed. Brown continued to modify the device, adding a vest that would distribute the beam’s weight on the cameraman’s body. He also rigged a system of bungee cords and pulleys to help him raise the camera to eye level. Eventually he felt confident enough to shoot a 16mm demo reel, which included footage of his girlfriend (now his wife) running down the front stone steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum. Los Angeles-based Panavision and General Cinema both expressed interest but insisted on a system that would work with 35mm cameras, which were substantially heavier than Brown’s 10-pound 16mm camera.
Brown knew the system he had devised couldn’t meet this weight demand, so he checked himself into a Pennsylvania hotel to concentrate on his ideas, scratching out sketch after sketch and occasionally baffling the housekeeping staff by running up and down the corridors with a push broom to experiment with balance. He drew inspiration from an ordinary swivel lamp, whose two separate parallelogram arm sections are held in place by springs. He took apart several and experimented with their components, thinking that they could perhaps “be the basis of the mechanical support.”
As the idea evolved, several critical elements became apparent, such as the importance of working carefully with the machine’s center of gravity. Brown broke down a camera’s components—the camera proper, battery, viewfinder, and, for a time, even the camera motor—and recombined them around the aggregate structure, rather like the parlor trick of placing a quarter in the prongs of two intersecting forks and balancing the works on the rim of a water glass. The feat appears to defy gravity, when in fact one has adjusted the forks so that the center of mass (or gravity) lies where the edge of the quarter rests on the glass’s rim. By dispensing each camera component’s mass away from the axis of rotation, Brown also increased the device’s inertia, making it more resistant to changes in motion.
He then hired a machinist to make an inverted, strengthened version of the swivel lamp mounting, which became a frictionless arm to support the camera. The arm had two identical, hinge-linked parallelogram sections, whose springs neutralized the camera’s downward-pulling weight. The arm attached to the operator’s vest to provide support and isolate the camera from the operator’s movements. Brown mounted the camera atop a balancing structure called the sled and connected it to the arm by way of a gimbal at the camera’s base, further isolating it from unwanted angular motions.
Devising a monitoring system that would enable the cameraman to see what he was filming continued to plague Brown. The fiber-optic cable proved difficult to see through. He later tried mounting a magnifying glass over a small video monitor.
Eventually Brown left the hotel with a simple and elegant design that didn’t rely on any advanced technology. “Knowing what I know now, I could have done it when I was 11,” he reflects. Not quite convinced his idea would work, he used his invention to shoot a new 35mm demo reel—once again of his girlfriend running down and then back up the museum steps—and his new partner, General Cinema, sent the reel to a number of filmmakers.
When cinematographer Haskell Wexler saw it, he hired Brown to shoot a Steadicam sequence for Bound for Glory , director Hal Ashby’s 1976 biography of folksinger Woody Guthrie. Brown opened the shot as he descended 30 feet to the ground aboard a Chapman crane, then stepped off the platform to follow actor David Carradine on foot through a migrant workers’ camp. Struggling to see through his viewfinder, Brown wasn’t sure exactly what he was getting.
Going to the screening room to watch the day’s footage, he felt even more insecure after mistaking the film’s producer for the projectionist. “So I sat way in the back, and Haskell Wexler’s dailies went by, two hours of gorgeous stuff, and I just got smaller and smaller, sure that this was going to be a disaster, because I couldn’t see it that well through that little magnifying glass video. And then the shot played and there was a moment of absolute silence at the end of it, and everyone roared to their feet and started clapping. They gave me a big hand; it was like a standing ovation for my first shot. It was almost the most excited I’ve ever been in my life.”
Director John G. Avildsen saw the demo reel, too, and liked the sequence of Brown’s girlfriend on the museum stairs—liked it so much, in fact, that he hired Brown to shoot Sylvester Stallone running up those same stairs, a scene that became an iconic segment of the movie Rocky (1976). Brown also shot footage for John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976), during which he learned just how eager rival companies were to discover the Steadicam’s secrets. “Somebody stuck an awl in my gas tank,” he recalls. While he went to have his car repaired, some men showed up at the location, removed the cover from the Steadicam, and began snapping photographs.
Kubrick asked Brown to join the production of the horror film The Shining in England, where he was shooting on huge sets representing the haunted Overlook Hotel. Kubrick, a noted perfectionist, put Brown through his paces as he insisted on take after complicated moving take, with the set lighting sometimes driving temperatures above 100 degrees. Kubrick’s demands could wear some people out, but Brown relished the opportunity to fine-tune his movements: he began to figure out exactly how to place his feet and move his heavily encumbered body so that he could follow the action and keep the precise framing Kubrick expected. “We had perpetual arguments,” Brown recalls cheerfully. “He wanted this Palladian, very centered composition, which is a style thing.” Brown maintained that no audience member would be able to notice the almost microscopic differences between takes. “Of course, one’s desire is to do exactly what Stanley wants,” he says. The discussions between takes gave Brown time to catch his breath for the next round of climbing stairs or racing around the Overlook in the attempt to create the perfect take.
Some shots were simply too repetitious to film repeatedly on foot, so Brown mounted the Steadicam’s arm on a special wheelchairlike device. For shots following young Danny Lloyd as he rode his Big Wheel tricycle around the Overlook’s corridors, the camera grip pushed Brown around in the chair. On a back platform attached to the chair crouched a soundman and the focus puller, who controlled the camera’s focus by remote control. Wireless transmitters fed audio and video input to Kubrick. As the chair spun round the set, director of photography John Alcott controlled the lighting, raising the lights ahead of the camera and lowering them once it passed, so the filmmakers wouldn’t cast shadows. “Our grip was a small, not particularly fit but dear man named Winkle,” recalls Brown. The crew shushed him often because the microphone picked up his muffled curses as he propelled the weighty apparatus after the indefatigable Danny.
The Steadicam proved to be indefatigable too, and the footage it created began appearing in many more films, winning Brown an Academy Award in 1978. He shot Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) leaving his dressing room and pushing his way into the arena for Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980). For Richard Marquand’s Return of the Jedi (1983), he strapped on his Steadicam and walked slowly through a northern California forest, shooting at one frame per second. Projected at a normal 24 frames per second, this steady footage provided the headlong backdrop for the film’s famous speeder bike chase. In 2000 he filmed his favorite Steadicam shot, 23 minutes of a live performance of Verdi’s La Traviata in Paris.
Steadicam shots have become a routine part of cinematic vocabulary. A Web site, www.steadishots.org, documents sequences from some of the hundreds of film productions that have used them. They have also become fixtures of television productions, such as the “walk and talk” scenes on The West Wing and the frenetic shots in a trauma center on ER . Used effectively, a Steadicam shot can serve as an instrument of revelation, explanation, or exposition that exploits film’s greatest strength—its power of movement—without the shackles imposed by traditional dollies or cranes.
Perhaps the Steadicam has made it too easy for filmmakers to embark on complex tracking. “I’m not entirely enthralled with long, uncut Steadicam shots,” admits Brown. “For one thing, if you’re not really clever with them, they can become way too boring.” The Steadicam has enabled filmmakers to create long and complex shots that have to be choreographed like a ballet; sometimes the director forgets to let these shots tell the story or, even worse, they are simply used to show off. “We’ve created something that is almost too facile,” reflects Brown. “Applying some aesthetic to it is another challenge.”
Brown founded the Steadicam Operators Association in 1988 and began teaching workshops, prepping hundreds of operators on the combination of technology, physicality, and politics necessary to put the instrument to good use. Steadicam operators must learn a certain amount of political savvy because they often arrive on set in midproduction and must mesh quickly with the crew. “It’s still an ensemble job,” Brown says. If you’re happy with a shot you’ve made, Brown advises, “Quietly say, ‘I like it. It was good.’ Don’t rave about it.” Focus pullers do crucial work at the Steadicam operator’s remote control; even when not pushing the Steadicam guy around in a wheelchair, the grips play an important role. “Instead of being a dolly pusher, they’ve become your shadow, your guide, your extra set of eyeballs, the hand that taps you if you’re about to bump into the doorway or grabs you if you’re making a gross mistake, the ones who stop you from falling down,” Brown tells his students. “So a good relationship with the grip department is still essential.”
Brown’s patents have expired—and there are Steadicam knockoffs everywhere—but he has continued to improve his original design, now licensed by the Tiffen Company. The arm is more sophisticated, and the monitors are a far cry from the fiber-optic rig Brown first relied on. (A company named Equi-poise has even licensed Steadicam arm technology to use as a mechanical lifting aid for heavy industrial tools.) The top-of-the-line Steadicam retails for $66,000, but Brown has developed less expensive models, down to a tiny $800 Merlin version designed for camcorders.
Even in this electronic age, filmmakers will continue to move their cameras physically, perhaps using the Steadicam, a dolly, or devices such as remote-controlled Louma or Akela cranes. Computer-generated imagery can create otherworldly tracking shots, such as the swooping, soaring movement into the evil wizard Saruman’s orc factory in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Filmmakers can also cheat by digitally stitching together several shots to make them look like a single take, as the makers of Children of Men (2006) did to create an epic tracking shot through a battleground. Software companies have even developed programs that will digitally smooth out shaky handheld video shots, perhaps the first step toward the “black box” that Garrett Brown once expected would eliminate the need for the Steadicam altogether. Maybe that will happen, maybe not. Until it does, filmmakers can still turn to the Steadicam and its offshoots when they want to create moving experiences that will leave their audiences stirred but not shaken.