Steady on: the technologies bringing filmmakers closer to the action

You may not be aware of it, but inside your brain is an advanced film production studio. 

As our bipedal bodies plod their way through space, sending tremors through our eyeballs with every footstep, this studio ensures our visual experience of the world is smooth and continuous.

Cameras do not have it so good. Sitting upon our shoulders, or held in space by our unsteady human arms, they’re subject to all the movements in our bodies, which they obediently capture in their shots.

The first decades of filmmaking smoothed out a lot of the bumps by putting cameras on tracks or cranes, and while these kept things gliding along nicely, they did limit where you can shoot – tracks can’t go up stairs, and they’re impractical on bumpy ground.

That was until the Brown Stabilizer, later to be known as the Steadicam.

How the Steadicam changed cinema

The invention of the Steadicam in the mid-1970s meant that for the first time, cameras could go off-road. The Steadicam hugely extended the range of where cameras, and therefore viewers, could go, marking a watershed in visual storytelling.

Its inventor, cameraman Garrett Brown, described moving camera shots before the Steadicam as now appearing “primitive”. He said: “What was missing, and it took me years to understand this, is the glorious continuity of movement that we have as humans.”

The Steadicam provided that visual continuity. It let viewers drop smoothly from over nine metres in the air to follow Woody Guthrie through a crowd (Bound for Glory, the first film to use Steadicam), and follow Jack Torrance’s son Danny on his tricycle round the corridors of Overlook Hotel (The Shining). Most memorably, it let us bound triumphantly up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art alongside Rocky Balboa (Rocky). 

The Steadicam isolates the operator’s movements from the camera, so that all the viewer sees is smooth motion, like that provided by our eyes. It’s made of three main parts: the vest, worn by the operator; the arm, which attaches to the vest; and a sled, an upright post attached to the arm via a gimbal.

The arm holds the camera and other equipment, including a monitor and battery. The gimbal lets the operator move the camera smoothly on all three axes. It can pan (side-to-side, also known as yaw), tilt (angling up and down, also known as pitch), and roll (rotation). Gimbals trace their history back to the ships of ancient Greece, where they were used to keep compasses steady on rolling seas.

Mounting the camera at the top of the sled and adding the counterweights of the battery and monitor to the bottom both increases the camera’s moment of inertia, that is, makes it harder to move, and moves the camera’s centre of gravity to the sled, where the operator can control it.

The arm does a lot of the heavy lifting, figuratively and literally, by absorbing the operator’s movements with a system of springs, hinges and links, and taking the weight of the camera, which is distributed comfortably through the operator’s vest.

Learning to operate a Steadicam with sensitivity and artistry takes years to master. Using one can also be physically demanding. “You have to have really good stamina,” says Ilana Garrard, a Steadicam operator who has worked on productions including Sex Education, Anatomy of a Scandal and Black Mirror.

Each Steadicam setup is fitted closely to the operator via the vest, and finely balanced before every shoot. Any misalignment could pull the operator off-balance and compromise their control. “Every single element is interlinked into how you understand your own body and how it’s balanced onto your body,” Garrard continues. “It’s a very personal and physical thing.”

After almost a half-century in Hollywood, the Steadicam is still a crucial piece of kit for many filmmakers. But in 2013, a technology debuted in the cinematography world that could provide the fluidity of a Steadicam shot without the years of training – the three-axis gimbal.

Enter the gimbals

Gimbals stabilise shots electronically by sensing their position in space. They do this with devices called inertial measurement units (IMU), and correct any undesirable wobbles or shakes with a system of motors. Camera operators simply load their camera onto the gimbal and shoot.

Gimbal IMUs incorporate accelerometers and gyroscopes, each a type of tiny device called a micro-electromechanical system (MEMS), to detect their motion relative to a starting position. (As well as keeping camera shots smooth, IMUs also hold drones steady and let you rapidly switch your smartphone from portrait to landscape mode.)

Gimbals’ versatility and accessibility – no years of Steadicam training required – has made them popular not only with influencers looking to eliminate footsteps from their TikToks, but also among Hollywood filmmakers seeking an intimate feel in their dramatic scenes. When paired with a load-bearing vest, or “exoskeleton”, they can let camera operators move hefty film cameras with the ease and sensitivity of entirely handheld cameras.

Director of photography for The Favourite, Robbie Ryan, used the Helix gimbal and exoskeleton system in order to manoeuvre a 24.5-kilogram Panavision film camera. He told Kodak that the Helix system “gives a visual language that is different to Steadicam, and allowed us to capture shots … in a fluid and floating way that you can’t achieve with any other piece of kit 35mm-wise”.

Filmmaker Rizwan Wadan was a major contributor to the research and development of Helix in direct partnership with camera technology company Letus. He founded the UK-based Mr Helix in 2016 to continue development of the system. Seeking to create a gimbal that could bear the weight of an entire cinema camera package, as a camera operator, he spent years studying how mass, inertia and balance interact.

A breakthrough came when, developing the first prototype with Letus, they decided to place the optical centre of the lens precisely at the pivot point – that is, where the operator is holding the camera. “That single engineering decision changed everything, because it meant the sensor stayed as still as possible while the frame absorbed the unwanted motion,” Wadan says. “Movement looks organic, the horizon stays level, composition stays intentional, and the image doesn’t have the artificial float common to drone-style gimbals.”

Wadan came to filmmaking with a mission: to improve relationships between the Muslim and non-Muslim world through storytelling. Having worked as a mechanic, he became fascinated by the technical aspects of the filmmaking process. He taught himself photography and filmmaking by taking on 44 LinkedIn courses in two and a half years. 

He adds: “Anything relating to the camera such as drones, cranes, gimbals, and exoskeleton technologies captivated my imagination as I could envision how they could be used to capture not just shots but stories entirely.”

Wadan works closely with filmmakers to ensure the technology supports their creative vision. The gimbal and the exoskeleton “were designed from a perspective of capturing drama,” he says. When working out how to develop the technology, “it was always with a script in mind”.

Despite its deployment on high-profile productions, the Helix system is still – strictly speaking – a minimum viable product that Wadan is continuing to develop and test in the field.

Friction is your friend

In a busy town square, Chris Herr is jumping up and down on the spot. Just in front of him, a film camera, suspended from a thin cord attached to his back via an arm, hangs in midair. Despite Herr’s hopping, the camera remains almost motionless, suspended in space. It should be impossible. Passersby stop what they’re doing for a better look.

Herr is demonstrating the Mantis, a camera stabilisation system that uses a length of elastic to dramatically reduce camera wobble. The elastic, up to nearly two and a half metres in length, runs back and forth along a series of pulleys that the operator wears on their back. Pulleys dampen the operator’s movements, while the elastic both takes the weight of the camera and allows them to move it freely in space.

"It’s a culmination of a lot of little hacks that I created on the rigs I’ve used over the last 10, 12, years on film sets,” explains Brett Harrison of BLKBRD, who developed the Mantis with Herr. “I realised that the more elastic the better. And so over the last eight years, I’ve added more and more pulleys to extend the amount of elastic that’s in place.”

The quality of the elastic, made of latex, is important. The pair tested different types for durability, stiffness and strength, and currently source it from a specialist supplier in Mexico. “It smells very aromatic when it arrives,” says Harrison.

These strong lengths of elastic can take a lot of weight, meaning today’s directors can get the aesthetic they’re seeking with heavy vintage movie cameras while enjoying the stabilisation modern tech provides. For his latest feature One Battle After Another, director Paul Thomas Anderson suspended a roughly 23-kilogram 1950s VistaVision camera – which offers rich detail in an analogue format, but without the graininess – from two Mantises.

While dramatic scenes at human timescales call for human camera operators, when capturing the drama unfolding imperceptibly slowly in the plant world, you need to call in the robots.

Age of the robots

“It’s a monster,” David Attenborough tells viewers.

A spiked fist of a plant slowly rises from the depths, before swinging around at the water’s surface like a mace wielded by a medieval knight. After clearing enough space, it starts to open, revealing more of its teeth-like barbs every second. As it opens and flattens on the surface, it shoves other plants out of the way, skewering any that happen to be too close. They shrink and retreat. Who knew a plant could be so savage?

Now, we do – all thanks to timelapse photography, which squeezes hours, days, months, even years of action, into seconds. The terrifying actions of this particular plant were captured on The Green Planet by a robotically controlled camera, one of a group that came to be known as the Triffids, built by visual engineer Chris Field.

The Green Planet producer Paul Williams brought Field on board after seeing his timelapse footage that followed a pitcher plant’s unpredictable movement as it grew. “I was able to tailor and adjust my motion with the robot over the course of six weeks, to capture it, keep it in frame and keep it looking good,” Field says.

Field taught himself how to create timelapses, starting out building the rigs that capture footage of the night sky. Wanting to get the camera to move while he was filming, but finding the systems on the market too expensive, he started building his own. “Robotics seems really complex, but most of this stuff kind of goes together like Lego,” he says. “You don’t really need formal engineering training.”

He uses a software package called Dragonframe to control the cameras, adjust the lighting and bring the shots together into a film. Being able to change how often you take shots of a plant on the fly is important. “Plants march to the beat of their own drum,” he says. “Filming plants is kind of like trying to take pictures of kids when they’ve had coffee and [are playing with] a puppy – like, very rambunctious.”

Like all of the other tech we’ve seen so far, Field’s systems are the result of a lot of trial and error. “You don’t start it knowing everything,” he says. “Everything that I have done, every success that I have, is a small little cap on top of a mountain of failure.”

Balancing technology with humanity

Cinema is a fertile ground for technological innovation, as filmmakers strive to push the boundaries to create things we’ve never seen before. “It’s absolutely phenomenal,” says Wadan. “The sets are designed to allow you to do what you could not do in the real world.”

Outside the studio, Harrison is developing software that aims to make film look more natural and organic by integrating models that mimic how our brains handle images. “We think that our eye is a window to the world,” he says. Actually, a lot of computation is happening in our brains to make what we see comprehensible to us. “Cameras just aren’t that way.” 

Meanwhile, new technologies let filmmakers digitally eliminate any shaky camera work. Could this signal the end of physical camera stabilisation technology? According to Harrison, this new tech hasn’t dampened interest in the Mantis. “There was a concern that … people would lose interest in hands-on creation of shots, but that hasn’t proven out at all; people seem just as intent as ever to craft the shot and be involved with the scene directly,” he says. “Filmmakers just want to hold a camera very specifically.”

Herr adds: “The analogue methods of operating a traditional Steadicam put a lot of finesse into the hands of an operator, much like a pen on paper.”

This is fundamental: filmmakers want the stability that these systems can provide, though never at the expense of their creative expression. Technology that creates a barrier between the action and capturing it will always be a nonstarter. 

Physical stabilisation technologies, like the Steadicam, Helix and Mantis, let the filmmaker enmesh themselves in the scene at the moment of capture, offering different ways to bring the audience as close to the action as possible. And at a time when high-end film formats such as VistaVision are regaining popularity, the stabilisation technologies allow operators to wield those whopping cameras more easily. 

“When I’m operating [filming a scene], I’m thinking less about the technology and more about what the audience should feel,” Wadan says. “Every movement, every slight tilt or pause, changes how a scene breathes … The camera shouldn’t draw attention to itself; it should move as naturally as emotion does.”

During a particularly emotionally heightened scene, the cast and crew can enter an almost meditative state, says Garrard. “The thing that I love most about my job it that when you are so into the performance, you’re feeling what the actor is feeling,” she says. “You have to let go of your own thoughts.”

In these situations, the Steadicam, a virtual extension of her body, helps her respond instinctively. “With a Steadicam you are just one person operating that camera, and so you are able to follow your feeling and react. That is the best kind of operating – where you combine photography, technology and emotion.”

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Leonie Mercedes would like to thank Chris Field, Ilana Garrard, Brett Harrison, Chris Herr, and Rizwan Wadan for their help in producing this article.