Building a camera dolly with track…
I did some shooting for some commercials the other day with the 35mm DOF adapter. However, I found all of the dolly shots I did, with the dolly that attaches to my tripod, to be very shaky. There seems to be a couple of reasons for this. First, the optical image stabilizer in my Canon GL2 behaves badly with the adapter so I have to turn it off. Second, the adapter adds a considerable amount of weight to the camera rig causing the cheap dolly rig to vibrate even more. So I had enough of that and decided to build myself a real camera dolly with a metal track. Here’s what I got so far:
As you can tell, I’ve built only the dolly platform. The track will be made out of the two aluminum pipes you see below the dolly. Interestingly enough, the dolly will roll very smoothly on the pipes, even with the pipes just on the ground and not attached to each other.
So here’s how I built the platform. The platform itself is 2 feet square made out of three 2 foot long 2″x6″ and four 2 foot long 1″x6″. The outer two 2″x6″ have had 45 degree rip cuts along each edge to allow easy attachment of four “L” brackets that hold each set of wheels at 90 degrees to each other. This allows the wheels to easily roll on a round pipe. The eight wheels are actually skateboard wheels usually used on old school style skateboards. These types of wheels are ideal because they are very soft and cushion the platform. To attach the wheels to the “L” brackets, I first drilled two holes in each bracket and attached the wheels with 5/16″ bolts and nylon lock nuts. I also added skateboard “speed” washers on each side of the wheels so the wheel or skateboard bearings wouldn’t touch the bracket or nut allowing the wheels to rolly freely. All in all, the platform wasn’t all that hard to build, and it rolls very smoothly. I should hopefully be able to build the track this weekend, and I may play with building some form of clamps on the platform to hold the tripod’s feet so it doesn’t fall off.
Posted by g1powermac under Construction,Filming | Comments Off