Camera Support and Movement

Filmcraft Workshop Series

The Cinematic Arts Filmcraft Workshop Series gives students the opportunity to learn hard skills and advance their ability in practical areas of filmmaking, such as cinematography, editing, post-production, and sound. The workshops run for six weeks, starting the Friday that drop/add ends, September 3rd. Each workshop is offered twice, on Friday afternoon and the following Saturday morning. No experience or registration is required.

The Cinematic Arts Filmcraft Camera Guides which accompany the workshops are provided as links at the end of this page.

Camera Support and Movement

Camera movement is easy to recognize and appreciate, but fiendishly difficult to execute.  Aside from issues of accuracy and stability, movement complicates focus, lighting, sound, and editing.  Almost every aspect of filmmaking is more difficult if the camera moves.

Camera movement is also one of the most expressive and personal characteristics of a filmmaker’s style–and for the reasons above one of the most neglected.  This workshop directs students toward the tools and techniques necessary to express the full vocabulary of cinematic movement in their own work.

The following elements will be covered in this workshop:

• Dollies, jibs, gimbals, and ad hoc rigs
• Hand-held technique
• The secret life of tripods
• Focus and lighting strategies for the moving camera

About the Instructor

Steve Milligan is a professional cinematographer. Over the last fifteen years he has worked in long and short form documentary, narrative features, commercials, music videos, and projection design. He has been a lecturing fellow in the Duke Arts of the Moving Image program since 2015, and advisor to the Duke student-run production company, Freewater Productions since 2006.

About the Location

This workshop will take place in the Cinematic Arts Studio in the Rubenstein Arts Center, 232.