One of the things that might be helpful is an over-view of how I came to invent the device, its development, my history, why I think it is a unique and yet to be fully realized invention, as opposed to some hobbled together parts that kinda work.
As I build out, you will hopefully find more and more links connecting bits and pieces of my thoughts and expanded commentary, but right now, I’m typing as fast as I can and hoping the wheels don’t come off.
I became first aware of the steadicam watching the Merv Griffen show. David Carridine was hawking his new movie Bound For Glory – given how he ended up – that’s not what the movie is about. They ran a clip of an an outake where someone came up and buggered the scene. The scene that did make it into the movie, won Garrett Brown and Academy award.
Moving forward in time, to the DSLR revolution, suddenly lighter rigs became available, a mad genius named Cheezycam figured out a way to put a Steadicam vest and arm together with a Glidecam sled, suddenly an affordable path to Steadicam Glory was available to all.
I jumped in, my first shoot was on a the Dance Documentary Sayaw, I became the DP on a teaser which became the award winning Television show, Strut, and somewhere in there I had a cancer and cyst surgery that made it impossible for me to operate my steadicam- frankencam, maybe….Hmm, there’s a name for the device.
So I was feeling sorry for myself in an unable to move without wincing and could barely wear a jacket because of the pain it caused, so forget the steadicam. I became interested in handheld gimbals, and about a year later when I was on a sailboat had that moment of inspiration and thought that could work.
I shot a short movie with Alissa Elegant to warm up for my first steadicam shoot in over a year. The actual shoot for Peter Chang Kinda sucked because we filmed it in a windstorm. I offered to make it up to Peter by volunteering to video for him at a dance salon he was performing at. I ended up videoing the entire evening, the creative director of the Salon and LEVYdance Garance invited me to build my device and perform with it at LEVY essentially calling my bluff. So much to my amazement, over the past year, I built the thing and with each iteration, it words just a bit better.
Right now, I have an artist in residence at Safehouse for the arts, with a performance on August 23rd and 24th. The reason I have so much time to type at the moment is because, I’m recovering from a biopsy to see if I have another cancer. So it goes.