In the past year, TV commercials and short branded films have taken over the commercial side of my business (after years of advertising photography, aside from the book and exhibition work) — which is great, I love creating motion content.

I work with whichever camera is most appropriate for the job, ranging from Red MX cameras to vintage low tech options such as Super 8 film. Sometimes an HDSLR is the right combination of look, economics, weight, light sensitivity, and workflow. This has been the case on a series of commercials I’ve been shooting for ABC Family.

When my team needed to put a rig together around the canon 5D camera, we discovered it was not merely an issue of looking at best-in-class solutions online and walking in the rental shop with a list. Every rental shop has a different set of items available for these cameras and there’s a surprising amount of confusion out there as to what works and what does not, even at this stage of the game.

A camera with so many work-arounds requires a diligent and systematic approach, combined with a lot of testing. Never rent a 5D rig without first assembling and ensuring its functionality before walking out of the rental house (same goes for any camera rig, but particularly important here).

So I’m writing this to share details on a rig that I have found effective in order to help those looking to do similar setups. I’m happy to discuss further or answer any questions – I answer all photo and filmmaking questions on Twitter @augustbradley

The functionality we needed:

• Wireless Follow-Focus
• 7” Field Monitor on Rig
• Larger Director’s Monitor at Video Village
• External Battery System to Power Accessories
• Balanced Rig
• Versatile configurations for quick changes to various camera movements (Jib, Dolly, Slider)

The images in the slide show embedded here show the rig we ended up with. Although it has been highly effective, it’s not perfect in part because available tools are evolving and in part because I want to get the entire system from one rental house to enable full assembly and testing at pickup.

Our solution:

• Anton Bauer external batteries on a Gold Mount adapter attached to a RedrockMicro cheeseplate with a 4 port Power Tap (D-tap) splitter (much prefer the vertically oriented cheeseplate for this). This setup can power the follow-focus motor, the Black Magic or AJA HDMI-SDI splitter, the 7” monitor, and the camera all off one battery if you have the right d-tap connectors and accessories. Our rental source did not have all the adapters to run it entirely off the single battery, though that would have been my preference for simplicity and efficiency. Place the battery opposite the fulcrum from the camera to balance the rig. Some battery sizes are better than others for balance. Test.

• Bartech Follow Focus.

• Black Magic HDMI-SDI converter/splitter to turn the 5D’s HDMI signal into two SDI digital signals for the on-camera monitor and the director’s monitor in video village.

• Another Redrock Micro cheeseplate to attach to Sachtler fluid head’s quick release plate.

• This is all assembled on the Redrock Micro 15” rods. When loaded to this extent, the RedrockMicro DSLR base-plate is not solid enough to hold the camera tightly in place when the follow-focus motor is moving a heavier lenses like the Zeiss 85mm, so we have found that combining the base-plate with the RedrockMicro MicroLensSupport (attached to the camera immediately in front of the base-plate) creates a more solid two-point attachment of the camera to the rods.

• Full range of Zeiss ZE lenses. Looking forward to the CP2 lenses.

• Mattebox and a set of filters to soften the look a bit.

• Marshall 7” SDI field monitor

• Lots of straps and bolts and velcro (the industrial strength “snap” velcro is awesome).

…that’s one approach that works. Very soon, we’ll trying some new rig components such as the Viewfactor Powercage and the new Zeiss Compact Prime 2 cinema lenses, so more to come soon.

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