Modern cinema relies very heavily on quadrotor drones, because they make for very smooth, very easy to position platforms. From slow pans to chase shots, drones are great– if your shots can be taken at a high enough altitude. Close to the ground, things get a bit dodgier. That’s where [Transistor Man]’s camera chase vehicle comes in— it’s a rover, so it excels close to the ground. In fact, it can’t go anywhere else, except perhaps if provided with a jump. It’s got a hefty gimbal to hold the camera steady on any terrain, a decade-old surplus radio to provide full HD FPV to the remote driver, and a powerful 1/5th scale radio control rally chassis to make it all go. Plus googly eyes, because everything is better with googly eyes.
It looks like an enormous amount of fun to drive, but more importantly it provides smooth, cinematic shots from the professional Sony camera held in the gimbal. One big takeaway is that when 3D printing something that will bounce around this much, you can’t rely on pure strength– flexible filaments are your friend. Just about everything printed ended up remade in TPU if it didn’t start that way. The other takeaway is that we’ve reached enough of a technological plateau that if you scrounge around, you can build something to take a top-of-the-line footage with decade-old castoffs, like the gimbal and radio used in this project, which is a great thing for hobbyists and small studios.
If you can’t find surplus, you could always DIY a gimbal. We’re not filmmakers, but we find ourselves wondering how shots made with this rover would compare to a camera slider.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzUtXMNizVo
I thought you might be posting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3XwQcfZQtw
LOL, now that the FAA has required, since the hyped 2015 Christmas Toy Drone Apocalypse that never happened, the registration of hobby RC pilots, I’ve wondered how long it would be before they come up with the same requirement for RC car drivers. Range would be very limited by ground structures, but an ambush mode could be used just as is being done now in Ukraine with RC drones where they wait in the weeds by the side of the road for a passing vehicle, out of sight and conserving battery life.
I had forgotten about the SF car jumps… doing it with a RC car had to be the last of the stunts.
This is actually super cool!
How can you talk about this and not mention the most famous low-angle motion-stabilized tracking shot of all time? Garrett Brown’s amazing Steadicam debut in The Shining : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjxQQ5PGSFU
REDRUM… The film was MUCH better than the book.
It bears an astonishing resemblance to Speed Buggy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jDtM9QlTq8