DIY Fig Rig

posted Jan 15th 2006 11:00am by Eliot Phillips
filed under: portable video hacks

fig rig

The Fig Rig is the brain child of director Mike Figgis. The Rig is designed to provide stability while using a handheld camera. If you’ve seen the continuous 90 minute takes in Figgis’s Timecode you know what prompted him to come up with this contraption. Like most digital video camera accessories the Rig comes with a premium price. KingVidiot has a forum post detailing his attempt at creating a homemade Fig Rig. He used an old steering wheel, a piece of aluminum plate and a wooden dowel. It isn’t that pretty to look at, but it definitely didn’t cost him $300 and it works pretty well too.

[thanks DVguru]

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Comments [9]

Reader Comments

cool, but no pics on the forum post

Posted at 11:16 am on Jan 15th, 2006 by carpespasm

That IS pretty cool. Now all I need to do is build one.

Posted at 11:51 am on Jan 15th, 2006 by tamzarian

Yeah, Nothing shows in Firefox, but in IE (gotta use it sometimes) it shows the little ‘pic failed’ box. You can then grab the actual location of the picture. Since he used geocities for hosting the pics, if more than two people look at the site over a span of a month it’ll stop access because he’s used too much bandwidth.

Posted at 11:56 am on Jan 15th, 2006 by [kj]

KJ and [Submitter], if you ever see a site like that, with cool stuff but stupid Geoshitties hosting, use the Coral Cache Firefox plugin to “Coralize it”.

Posted at 3:16 pm on Jan 15th, 2006 by tavor

Kind of like the $14 steadicam:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam/

Posted at 4:39 pm on Jan 15th, 2006 by captsnuffy

Somebody should setup something similar to mirrordot for hackaday. Hell, even hackaday could or at least use the distributed caching of nyud.net automatically instead of direct links. Just because people are hackers doesn’t mean they understand web hosting.

Posted at 4:56 pm on Jan 15th, 2006 by Chris

wasn’t this invented by Sam Raimi for the Evil Dead films (the first or second i think) I remember in the extras of the trilogy DVD theres a segment on how they constructed a lange woden frame to hold a camera that would make moving the camera by hand much smoother… And I’m sure that came out far before timecode…

Posted at 5:06 pm on Jan 15th, 2006 by Mikko

Raimi made the “shaky cam” which s just a camera strapped to a board which is suspended by a rope on each end.

Posted at 6:27 pm on Jan 15th, 2006 by jason

couldn’t one theoretically host a site from coralcache?

Posted at 10:46 pm on Jan 15th, 2006 by alex