rig

I'm an avid reader of www.diyphotography.net. Many crazy cameras and rigs available there -- just beneath the light painting and shaped bokeh stories. Valentine season is at hand so you may have to wade through rather a lot of those.

I take DIY to heart. Don't Impale Yourself is a guiding principle behind most of my projects. This mandate has taken on a new urgency in the years since I became a father. DIY is now Do It Years (from now) for the craziest schemes.

My eldest is now four and very interested in photography and stop motion cinematography. I have so far found the plains of DIY photography for children to be pretty barren.

I know next to nothing about stop motion. I know that the Apple App Store doesn't have the answer. My children use my Canon EOS 40D for their projects. I have a couple of cheap shutter release cables that they shoot with.

Use of a remote shutter alone eliminates about a third of the mechanical error that creeps into our short films. Another third is model errors. The final third is the camera mount itself. I have never found a stable camera mount that kids are comfortable with. The Joby GorillaPod line is as clever as it ever was but it usually slumps during filming. I have many tripods with a variety of ingenious quick-collapse features that surprise and terrify kids.

LEGO and DUPLO are recurring themes in our studio. They are familiar. They stick together. They are perfect for both abstract art and detailed staging.

They are repeatable. This is very important. At any moment, we may have three pictures in production and perhaps all stalled. Union, finance, and insurance issues don't simply evaporate because we're indies. Most of the production deals we have require us to insure our stars against accidental swallowing. You try talking to your underwriter about that! We simply don't have enough LEGO to support this degree of concurrency. We don't even have space for that much LEGO. We certainly don't have space for several partial sets. Models routinely come, go, and come again between shots.

For some time, I have been recording camera positions relative to models with bricks on LEGO baseplates. Only recently did I put a bolt through a DUPLO and mount the camera directly. The result is very satisfying. The mount works for the kids. They build new mounts themselves. The universe of LEGO and DUPLO rail becomes a dolly system that we all love.

Canon 40D on DUPLO plate with generic ball head
Photo courtesy your correspondent

I found that a 4x8 DUPLO plate supports my camera with a 50mm 1.4 USM lens attached. These plates have an injection molding mark right in the center that is a perfect spot to start drilling. The plates are available from brokers for less than a buck.

LEGO themselves marketed a line of movie-themed toys at the turn of the century. This line included several novel prop pieces that could be used when making LEGO movies about moviemaking. Some sets included a cheap USB webcam as well. That camera had LEGO studs. That line added no new moviemaking tools and merits no further discussion.