Creating and Using the Camera Dolly

For two of our scenes, we required to create a tracking motion and to create the desired effect, we required a camera dolly. However, our school does not have its own that we can use, and working with an essentially non-existent budget, we were forced to improvise. At first we experimented with using a bicycle, we found that it was too unbalanced, and the practice shots came out too wobbly, we then moved on to thinking about using a very slow moving car, with a tripod set up in the open boot, much as we had done for the motorbike shoot. However, we then decided against this as we had to change the area that we were going to do the shot in and this could have been potentially inaccessible for the car, we also would have only been able to shoot one of these shots using this method and the sound from the car’s engine would have interfered with the recording of the dialogue in the other. So the car was out.
A skateboard seemed to be an ideal starting point for our dolly as its four wheels meant it would stand up on its own and its relatively flat top would be good for placing the tripod. There were some issues with the skateboard that needed to be fixed. The first was the size of the skateboard, which was too small to extend the legs of the tripod. To fix this a larger plank of wood was placed on top, this was found to be big enough for the tripod, but was a bit unbalanced, so a folded up towel was put between the skateboard and the wood which worked well. After trying this out at home, I found the footage to be too shaky due to the skateboard’s small wheels going over the bumps in the floor. This was fixed by laying leftover laminate flooring from my kitchen, on the ground to create a flat surface for the skateboard to smoothly run across.
After first completing this set up at home, it was then taken into school, the location we were going to use it. Josh and I set up the dolly and ‘track’ slightly earlier than we had scheduled to film in order for us to get some practise using it before we actual take. After this trial we added some thin foam insulation under the joins of the laminate flooring to help improve smoothness and some duct tape to cover the joins on top, to the same end.
Overall I am very pleased with how this turned out and we found worked very well and the resulting footage, I think, turned out to be one of the best shots in the finished trailer and gave a very professional look to the scenes it was used in.
If I was to create another version of this dolly one improvement I would make would be to somehow make some sort of rail system to keep the skateboard in a perfectly straight line, as at first we found that the board tended to lean slightly to one side due to the ground faintly sloping and so was turning to the left a bit and sometimes rolling completely off the ‘track ’ when we were first trying it out. But after practice we were able to overcome this problem by putting a bit more weight on to the opposite side, thereby negating the problems that the unforeseen sloping caused.
For the second shot that required the use of the dolly, we were inside, on a smooth lino floor in our school corridor so the laminate flooring 'track' was not needed.

Here are some pictures and a video of the track in use

Shooting Timetable

Here is a table of all the filming we did, when we did it , who was there, and what props we would need for each shot.
It was important to plan far in advance for our filming as we had a large cast and it was difficult to arrange days on which everyone was available. It was important therefore, that when we had such an opportunity we had planned ahead for any and to nake sure that we did the shooting in an time efficient way, and to make sure we got all of the shots required completed within the timeframe that we had. There where many factors that we had to take into account when we were planning to do a shoot:

• Availability of cast and crew
• Weather
• Light, a lot of our filming was done during the winter period, where it gets dark quickly.
• Times that we could organise and negotiate permission to film in locations where this was required.