After I got our of college, I was the “grown up” among my friends (most of whom were still in school). They were living in small apartments, eating too much pizza, going to the beach a 3 am. I was married, had a house… and a workshop.
The fact that I loved to make things worked really well with the fact that a bunch of my art student friends didn’t have access to the tools and space that they wanted to accomplish their art. One of my really good friends (the extremely talented Anthony Dodero) was shooting some film work and wanted a couple of simple jigs to get improve the shots. One of them involved cantilevering a camera out a car window (crazy, dangerous, etc) but the other was pretty easy to figure out.. a really simple camera counter balance.
Steadicam is a brand name, but the word has become synonymous with a unit to help stabilize hand held camera shots. The real Steadicam units are often MUCH larger and are mounted to a chest harness to help distribute the weight of the rig to your torso. Since we were looking for something on a college student budget, we went with steel pipe from a big box store.
Check out this really simple build below, and if you’ve got suggestions for add-ons/improvements please leave them in the comments!
Here’s what you’ll need:
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- 3 lengths of 3/4″ steel pipe
- 3/4″ steel pipe T fitting
- 1/4-20 x 1 ” screw and two 1/4-20 nuts
- 2 3/4″ steep pipe caps
- 1 3/4″ steel pipe flange
- 1″ PVC pipe (about 6″ in length)
- Duct tape
- Flat black spray paint