Camera Mounts for Cars

For the pilot we hired a camera mount specialist from Austin. The specialist installed cameras on Jack Farr’s mustang and we used it as the ‘camera car’. Joe Dea, our director, was completely frustrated by how much the mount vibrated. Evidently, even an ‘expert’ can have issues so make sure you ‘test’ your mounts prior to shooting (i.e. a week or so before is ideal). Don’t show up to the shoot with a mount you have never tested, you can ruin a whole day of filming if you do. There are lots of DIY kits if you don’t have the budget for a mount guy.

For the series we had several more cameras as well as a specifically designed ‘camera car’ with mounts pre-installed. These worked at LOT better than the ones we used for the pilot. Here are a few photos (with my son Ethan):

Also, here are some interesting videos from YouTube with examples of car mounted cameras

I don’t believe this one:

This looks a little crazy too:

Aerial Photography

In the pilot episode of MotorSport Ranch we didn’t have the budget for aerial photography and at the time HD cameras were too heavy to mount to remote controlled helicopters. One of the members of MotorSport Ranch owned a helicopter he chartered for various news organizations and offered to take our camera man up for a few aerial shots of the track and our race. While this was a great opportunity, we hadn’t planned for an aerial shoot and didn’t have the appropriate mounting equipment to fix our camera in the helicopter. We decided to go hand held and as a result very few of the shots were usable. Here are a few pictures:

The guys at VOOM insisted we have aerial shots in the series so we began looking for inexpensive solutions for aerial shots throughout the shooting schedule. It would have been cost prohibative to keep a real helicopter on the set for the entire week so we opted for a remote control option. By the time we began shooting the series, Sony had released a very small 3-chip HD camera that could film in 1080i and were we able to mount it on a remote controlled helicopter. It took two people to control the remote control helicopter; one to fly the helicopter and another to control the camera. It was interesting listening to the two operators bicker. The camera controller watched the footage via a wireless 2.4 ghz feed to his monitor. Here are a few photos of the rig:

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Camera Stability

There are lots of ways to cut costs in television production, but often times they produce unexpected results. In our case we saved considerable costs by renting standard lifts to mount our cameras on. While a standard lift might work in industrial or construction applications, a carpenter doesn’t need flawless stability. The wind kept blowing the lift and making the shots unsteady (a big issue when you are filming in HD). Check out the lifts blowing in the wind:

When you can get the camera on solid ground, with a heavy tripod you get much better results: