Stuff You Should Know - How Steadicams Work

Episode Date: June 17, 2016

There have been many inventions that have advanced filmmaking, but maybe none as important as the steadicam. Invented in the mid-70s, it literally changed the way movie making happened, and made the impossible possible. Learn about the fascinating history behind this amazing technology today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there.

Chuck's wearing a hat, so it's something you should know. Yeah. Still, still pretty sad. Yeah. Are you really? Sure. Aw, all right, Pete. You know what, I'm getting the,

Josh is referencing my last chance garage hat that I've talked way too much about. I'm getting the patch remade as we speak. Whoa. Actually found one in eBay that had been sold three months ago. And it's all a big conspiracy. Is that right?

No, no, not really. But I found a picture of the patch that I sent to a patch maker who like, can digitally reproduce this thing. Nice, man. Well, that's great. Then I gotta find the right hat. It's coming back home. Well, that's step one.

That's a big step one. Yeah, I'm getting a few patches and a few hats this time. I think that's a good idea. You can name them one through eight. That's right. Let's see, Chuck. You worked in the film industry previously. Yeah, so did you, technically.

Yeah. You did more than I did by far. You worked in front of and behind the camera. That's right. Did you ever work with a steady cam at all? Yeah. So like, you've seen these things up close. Yep.

I don't recall Scott or anybody using one. We did not have one on our show. Okay. They're expensive. Okay. But I mean, there was some pretty good equipment on set, it seemed like to me. Sure.

But there was no steady cam, right? Nope. Because I was trying to recall, and I could not for the life of me remember a moment when there was an awesome like extendo arm camera with like all of the components exploded out into different parts of a pole. That didn't happen,

you could have walked in and said, what's that? Right. And everyone would have laughed and you would have been like, why does everyone make fun of me? I would have been like, I'll be my dressing room. Now we never use one on our TV show for science channel because like I said, it's pricey to rent.

And this is a bit of a giveaway, but a person, steady cam operator, comes with the package. Right. With all the equipment. It's a lot of times their own. And it's, you know, it's pricey. Yeah.

But that lady or that dude. Right. But the reason it is pricey is because it's, it has really good effect. Yeah. And the person who's doing it really knows what they're doing. Yeah.

I don't know, but just from researching this, it seemed like they were probably the most skilled trades person on the set at any given time when they were on the set. Is that right? Well, I think it's just a matter of what skill. It's just a different skill. Are they like the highest echelon of camera operators?

No, it's just different. Okay. Like a top notch. They're niche. Yeah. Okay, I got it then. But you don't just wade into steady cam and start getting work the next day.

It does take a lot of work to master, but like a good dolly grip is just as skilled. Right. It just pushing that thing around. But that takes a very. Non-herky jerky. Well, it's not gonna be herky jerky anyway, but just to hit the marks right.

Oh, I see. Yeah, I mean, all that stuff takes a great amount of skill. Well, let's talk about this because steady cam, you know, when I came of age was already invented. It was basically became commercially available the year I was born. So I don't really know a world prior to steady camp. I've never seen a movie that came up before 1976.

Funny. And I'm just used to it, right? Yeah. But it's interesting to look back and see that there actually is a point in time where this one dude who was actually kind of an outsider of the movie business, basically changed it permanently forever.

For sure. Yeah. His name was Garrett Brown. Is Garrett Brown? Yeah, he's still around, right? Yeah. And he was working for, well, he was working in TV commercials

and on Sesame Street in Philadelphia. Yeah. And he got a little frustrated as camera people do pre-steady cam with not being able to accomplish certain shots. Yeah, there's supposedly there were 30 impossible shots that just based on the equipment of the day, you just couldn't do, right?

Yeah. And a lot of it had to do with like rough terrain. Sure. Staircases were a big one. Yeah. And the reason these shots were impossible, it's not like you couldn't lug a camera around up and down the stairs.

But the movement that the camera recorded would be so jarring that it would render the film like that it would be unusable. Yeah. And this was in a day before, I mean, there were shaky cam shots and like Cassavetes and all these early indie filmmakers did a lot of like avant-garde handheld stuff,

but it was known as avant-garde. Right. Because it looked different. Yeah. And people were used to kind of smoother looking things in mainstream movies at the time. Yeah. I had like a real frenetic energy to it.

Yeah. Which you see all the time now. Yeah. It's like a bonafide thing. But it wasn't just like picking up the movements of the camera, it was like telegraphing them as far as the human brain's concerned. Because we take it for granted.

But we have in our own brains a pretty complex system that involves the inner ear coordinating with the movement of the retina. So that it offsets the movement and the motion and the jarring impact of like just walking. Yeah. Like if we didn't have that, we wouldn't be able to focus on anything

while we were moving around. Yeah. People wouldn't jog. They would get sick and vomit every time they jog. Exactly right. And you certainly wouldn't be able to like read us magazine while you were jogging or something like that. No.

The fact that you can, it really shows how incredibly complex and well-developed the system is, right? Yes. That's what the Steadicam that Garrett Brown created sought to recreate. And he did it. He nailed it like on the first time out basically.

Yeah. Cause we mentioned a dolly. That is people that know film know this stuff is like pretty rudimentary information, but a lot of people don't know what a dolly is. And they see the word dolly grip in a movie. They just think it sounds funny. But the dolly is how you typically would get a smooth shot.

It's just a big super, super heavy sled with wheels that the camera sits on and the camera operator sits on. And it's either on a very smooth floor or it's on a piece of track like a little railroad car. And it pushes along and that's how you get those nice smooth shots. Right. So that's a dolly.

The problem with a dolly is you can't really lay that track over a rocky terrain if you're filming on Mars or something like that. No. And like you said, you can't push it up and down stairs. Just had its limitations. Right, it did. So Garrett Brown said,

I'm sick of these limitations. I'm so tired of being limited by dolly stupid dollies. I'm gonna invent something better. And so he tinkered around with what was called the Brown Stabilizer at first, which he later renamed to the Steadicam. And to show off, like at first he was just using them in commercials and he was like,

this is way bigger than just commercials. I'm gonna make a sizzle reel. And he made a sizzle reel of the 30 Impossible Shots that you just couldn't do before. And he did it with the Steadicam, but he didn't show how it was done. Yeah, and you can, he was able to save 10 of those shots and digitize them.

And a couple of years ago, he finally released online 10 of those. So you can actually go see this original reel. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And see his wife and his best friend like just doing stuff while he was. Just doing stuff. Like, you know, like one of them was swimming.

You can't run alongside somebody swimming apparently was an impossible shot. I'm not quite sure why. Well, you just couldn't run alongside someone doing anything. Oh, okay. That's what it was. Dolly? Well, no, you could have laid Dolly track down

the length of a swimming pool, sure. Right, that's why I didn't understand that one was an impossible shot. But to show off, he goes around a slide. Just to kind of show. Maybe that was the impossibility of it. But then his buddy gets out of the pool and like he pivots around him.

And I'm sure when he put this reel together and he sent it out, the directors are like, this is magic sorcery? Well, it was mind blowing. And some people say it was the first viral video because it was shared around Hollywood literally in a matter of days. Everybody in Hollywood was saying,

what in the world? Like you said, what is this sorcery? This Garrett Brown has bestowed upon us. Yeah, it was a bit of a mic drop as far as that reel goes. And Stanley Kubrick being Stanley Kubrick sent a message to Garrett Brown that said, if you are really concerned about protecting its design

before you fully patent it, I suggest you delete the two occasions on the reel where the shadow on the ground gives the skilled counterintelligence photo interpreter a fairly clear representation of a man holding a pole with one hand with something or other at the bottom of the pole which appears to be slowly moving.

All of that is Stanley Kubrickian for, hey, there's a shadow in one of your shots. Right. Of the steady cam op. Yeah, which was pretty cool of him to do. Sure. Because I'm sure there were plenty of people in Hollywood who would have been like, okay, I think I'd kind of get the idea of what this was.

Because there was no suggestion whatsoever of what Garrett Brown had used to get these shots except in those shadows. So he went and immediately cut those, I think 14 seconds out of his reel and then released the second edition. And it looked pretty good. I mean, it's rough compared to today's standard.

Sure, but I mean like. But for the time it was like unbelievable. Right. He used everything. Oh yeah. And one of the shots that he got was his wife, Ellen. He said, dear, why don't you put on your most 70s bell bottoms you can find.

And I'm going to run up behind you as you run up the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And maybe when you get to the top, you can raise your hands in triumph and I will spin around you. And if that shot sounds familiar, it actually attracted a guy, a director named John, what is it, Avelson?

Yeah, John G. Avelson. Who said, I like this, I'm going to use it in this little film I'm directing called Rocky. Yeah. And I didn't get whether or not this was the case, but did they locate Rocky in Philadelphia because of those steps? No.

Because he said, how did you do that and where are those steps? I don't think so, man. Because I wondered that too, like did he not have a scene written where Rocky just runs up those steps? Right. I mean, Stallone wrote it. Right.

I think they added it. Well, we'll just have to ask him. Okay. Hey, Sly. Ooh. I was wondering if you could do it, that was pretty good. I answered in that little moment. You'll have someone who'll have to interpret that.

Great movie though, man. I rewatched that. Rocky? Yeah, like this year, from beginning to end, just phenomenal movie. Yeah. I'm trying to get Emily to watch it. Has she never seen the original?

No. It's its own thing, for sure. Like it's not much like the sequels. It's not a boxing movie, really. It's a love story, for the most part. It's a love story and like the triumph of the little guy. Yeah. Story, for sure, yeah.

Featuring boxing. Right. That's exactly right. Yeah. But two and three and on, onward, it's like a totally different thing. Yeah, but those are good too. Yeah.

They said, let's take your story, take out the heart and insert cocaine instead. Insert Mr. T. I don't get the cocaine reference. Oh, it's just the 80s and Hollywood got their hands on it. Sure. You know what I mean? I got you.

Yeah, that's a good question, though. I wonder about that. If he, surely they didn't remake it for Philadelphia just for that. Well, but the point is, is Garrett Brown created on this sizzle reel one of the most iconic shots in filmmaking history. For sure.

And he sent that reel out and within that year, I believe, 1976, three major motion pictures hired him to operate his steady cam for it. There was Rocky, there was, what was the one about Woody Guthrie? Bound for Glory. Yeah. I think that one came out first.

So that was the first actual. Right. And that one, the steady cam up was Garrett Brown, I think for all these, because he was the only guy that knew it. He got a lot of work early on. Yeah. I think the patent was still pending until 1977.

So I'm sure he didn't let the thing out of his sight. Everybody close your eyes while I shoot this. But on Bound for Glory, he was on a crane even that lowered down, stepped off the crane. So people had seen crane shots, but then for the crane to go down, down, down, and then all of a sudden start following this guy, everyone was like, what in the world?

Right, there would have been a cut after the crane stopped. And then before, they would have cut and he would have gotten in position and then started up again. This is one smooth shot. One smooth shot. Yeah, and then the other one was Marathon Man.

So just right out of the blue, this guy who is a commercial director and made short films for Sesame Street changed filmmaking like single-handedly. Yeah, and won an Academy Award in 1978 for technical achievement. Got that patent in 77. And well, that's it.

That's the history of the steady cam. That's it, everybody. Good night. But we're gonna, should we take a break and tell everyone how this thing worked? Let's do it, man. ["Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"] On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck. So the study camp, do you remember

when we did our episode on breathalyzers? Oh, boy, that was a long time ago. And we found out that the breathalyzer is one of the most complicated machines on the planet. I kind of hated that one. Like, there were crystals involved somehow. I hated that one, too. Dark crystals.

This is a bit like that. Like, if you really dive into study cams like this article on how stuff works does, it's labyrinthine. Talk about the dark crystal. We're talking labyrinth instead. Yeah, but we're going to simplify it, because you don't need to break this thing apart

and look at every component like this article does. I mean, it really gets involved. What you should do is look at a picture of someone operating one. And just because when you look at it, you go, it all makes a lot more sense. Right, and there's really just three main parts to the whole thing.

There's a vest. There's an arm that's attached to the vest. And then the other end of the arm is attached to what's called the sled, which is what the camera and its components are mounted on, right? Yeah, and that arm, I mean, just pick yourself wearing like a baby Bjorn baby carrier, except for instead of the baby at your sternum,

there's a mechanical arm coming out. Like a spring arm lamp. Yeah, like a accordion arm or a spring arm lamp. Right, and it's virtually the same thing. Well, yeah, and guess who made one of these by himself before they started making them for at home people. Who? Casey?

No. Who? My brother, of course. Oh, did he really? Yeah. Yeah, my brother made one of these in like the early 90s. Did he really? Out of door hinges and rubber bands and springs.

Does he still have it? Is it in the Smithsonian? I don't know. It's in the Scottsonian, which is where all his early inventions. With all his pinball machines? Yeah, but he made one. He basically did the same thing.

He looked at it and looked at these swing arm lamps and accordion arm lamps. And it's like, well, it's the same thing. I'll just make a version of that. It is, and it worked pretty good. It's virtually the same thing. Yeah. So the whole point of a steady cam

is that it basically simulates, or the arm at least, simulates a human arm, right? To where it can move around very easily. Yeah. And it redistributes the weight of the camera, which can be up to like 70 pounds. I imagine probably more. Yeah, the whole unit is pretty heavy.

And it's not easy to operate. But it'll wear you out. It holds it effortlessly. And it holds it in place. This arm does. And it does it by using springs. And you can adjust the tension of the springs by using a cable and pulley system

so that it offsets the balance of the camera and holds it in space in front of the camera operator, basically so that they can move it effortlessly up, down to the side. You can put the camera on top of the sled so that you get high shots. You can switch it so it goes on the bottom so you can get low angle shots. Yeah, the traditional, it's called high mode and low mode.

And high mode is, it doesn't mean it's high. It just means it's on the top of the unit. And then low mode is when it's on the bottom. So if you wanted to film a mouse running across the floor, you would put it in low mode. If you want to film a human, you'd put it in high mode. And the camera itself is broken out into pieces, which is kind of an ingenious trick

that I guess Garrett Brown came up with himself. I think he did. And this is the third part, the camera sled, right? Yes, the sled is what holds all the equipment. And it's basically a pole with a little bit at the top called the stage. Yeah. And that's where the camera goes.

Or it could be at the bottom, wherever the camera is. The camera's mounted to the stage. Then you get the pole itself. And then the, I guess the arm is connected to the pole by a gimbal. A gimbal. A gimbal, that's right. And that's like an old technology.

It's basically something that uses basically a gyroscopic action to take the movement of whatever is seeking to move whatever you want to hold still and getting rid of it. Like everything around it moves except for the thing that you want to hold still. Yeah, it's pretty neat. It's super neat.

And that's just the one arm that's connected to the pole. So you can see how complicated this thing is. That this guy sat back, and I think in a hotel room somewhere, he put it together. Garrett Brown, the first one. There's just the ingenuity it took to put this together. It's pretty in depth as far as inventions go. Yeah, and there's a little science to it.

There's something called moment of inertia. It's basically how much that camera is resistant to rotation. So if you want the camera to be still, you want to increase that resistance to the rotation. And this is determined by a couple of different things. How much mass there is to the object, and how far that mass is from its own axis of rotation.

So by spreading the camera out, he basically took the little, cameras come with a monitor now, so you can see what's going on, and a big, heavy battery. He took the monitor off of the camera. He took the battery off of the camera and redistributed that up and down the pole. So what he ended up doing was spreading out that mass, which takes away the center of gravity

from the camera itself. Yeah, because with a regular camera, where all the components are in one single unit, that center of gravity is inside the camera. So it's easy to rotate. But since he exploded it out into its various components, he made that center of gravity land somewhere on the pole. And the gimbal attaches to the pole

just above the center of gravity, so that the camera operator holds the pole and manipulates the camera at the center of gravity, which makes it very easy to balance, keep balance. Yeah, and they do a good job in this article if you'd like, just take a broomstick and you find that center of gravity with your finger, you can hold it with your finger and lift it up and down.

Right, and it's just balanced on your finger, because you're hitting that center of balance. That's right, it's the same principle. And in fact, if you took that same broomstick and cut it off and you just had three feet of broomstick and just took your SLR camera and screwed that broomstick into the bottom of your camera instead of a tripod, that would function.

You could walk around with that, and it would be steadier than if you just had it in your hand. Oh, I could see that, because of the change of the center of gravity. Change of the center of gravity, and if you put a little counterweight at the bottom, it would make it even more steady. And that's the whole concept of the steadicam sled.

Then attach that to an arm, that accordion arm, and you're cooking with gas. Yeah, because you were saying, if you walk around with just the pole holding or the broomstick, cut off the broomstick, and you're holding it just with your hand, it's steady. The point of the arm is it's taking your hand out of the equation and replacing it with something

that can isolate movement even more so that your movement of you walking just gets lost within the arm before it ever gets to the camera and could shake it. Yeah, like if you did it with a broomstick, your arm is the same thing as a steadicam arm. Right, except it's better. If the steadicam arm is. Is better than your human arm.

Right, exactly. Pretty neat stuff. It is neat stuff. And I think that's it for the science man. We made it through it. Yeah, I mean, it's all got to be very precisely balanced. You don't just throw the stuff on the pole willy nilly. No, and they point out that the balance of the camera

can actually change during filming. Yeah. Just from the film moving from one end of the camera to the other as it records, right? Well, yeah, in the old days when they used film, for sure. Nowadays it's just that digital card. Yeah, I'm sure. Well, not always.

I mean, those camera operators have to deal with this. Yeah, and if you've ever been on a job with a steadicam, there's a lot of breaks where, I mean, you can adjust them on the fly more now, but I remember there just being a lot of breaks with a steadicam up would say, hold on. I need five minutes, and they go over, and they have a little stand that they put it on to take.

Because it takes the weight off to a certain degree, but it's still a lot of weight to be carrying on a vest on your chest. Yeah. And running and moving and doing all sorts of stuff. Yeah, it's a tough gig. Like, there's a pretty amazing video. Did you watch it of that Eurovision shot?

No. There's a guy from, I think, Belarus singing, and they showed him. They did see that. He's like, they showed the shot, and then they showed what somebody filming the shot being done. And the guy with the steadicam wearing the vest

rides down the aisle on a segue. Is that what he's on? Yeah, hops off, runs up this ramp, and then starts circling around the guy who's singing. And it's a pretty amazing thing. It's a great shot. But then when you see how it's done, wow. That guy deserved a standing ovation.

It would have been more impressive had it not, like the subject matter, been more interesting and the video quality had been better. It was pretty, pretty bad. Like, if it was a Scorsese movie, you'd be like, wow. But it was this kind of corny, I mean, it looked like an American Idol or something. It was, but it was American Idol.

If you took American Idol at its peak and then spread it out over Eurasia, and it was popular over that large of a population, that's what Eurovision is. That's right. So you want to talk about some of the shots when we come back after a break? Please.

OK. Let's get started. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye,

bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so Chuck, in addition to that Rocky shot and that Eurovision shot, there are some other very famous shots, classic shots of all time. Yeah. That had to do with Steadicam.

It couldn't have been done without Steadicam. Well, the shining is the first one that pops into most people's minds, because, like we said, Kubrick was a big fan of this invention and immediately started talks with Garrett Brown on how to help him out with this movie, the shining that he was making. Right.

And apparently they kind of battled one another quite a bit on the set of the shining. And Garrett Brown later admitted, he said a lot of that was probably, what do you call it, like inventors, pride, or something, kind of getting in the way of this brilliant all tour. So Kubrick already had his own ideas on how to best use this thing that this other guy invented.

And the shining's classic example, those tricycle shots, the famous maze chase at the end, very iconic in motion picture history. Yeah. And I mean, how did they, do you know how they did that shot behind Danny on his little big wheel? They probably just went into low mode and. Like walked behind him?

Yeah, ran down the hall after him. That's really impressive. Yeah. So the shining's a big one. Sure. Rocky's a big one. Goodfellas is another classic example, too. Classic.

Where Ray Liotta and Lorraine Braco are going into the Copacabana, but they go through the back. And they're followed throughout the back stairs into the kitchen. And then they finally come out into their table. And it's like one uninterrupted five minute shot or something. It's amazing. And I think when you see this, you might see it and not

be a discerning film viewer and just say, well, that, but I didn't notice anything, which is probably good. Or you might be a fan of the Steadicam and say, man, that was amazing. Then you have to step back and look at lighting and realize that how incredibly hard it is to light a shot like that. That takes place over, I don't know, how many hundreds of feet.

What, without seeing the lights in the shot? Well, that or just consistent lighting and having it look good. I mean, that's just usually you light for like a room or something or a hallway. Right. Yeah, yeah. But to light all those different rooms and hallways and just incredibly, I can't imagine how long it

took to set that shot, you know. They were like, wait, what do you want to do? Yeah, it'll be great. Don't worry about it. Stay with me. You know, he's making another gangster movie. No, I didn't know that. Yeah.

And it may be like the, some folks are saying it's like, you know, his last big gangster movie. Yeah. But it's got De Niro again. OK. He hadn't worked with him in a long time. Pacino and Joe Pesci is coming out of retirement. I didn't even know he was retired.

I just thought he wasn't doing stuff anymore. No, man, he retired. Didn't know that. Yeah, so he's got the three heavyweights and supposedly Harvey Cattel, of course. You got to throw him in there. Sure. But I'm just like giddy thinking about this.

Yeah, I'm glad he is. Because his last one was The Departed, right? No, he's made movies since then, like Wolf of Wall Street. I was his last gangster movie. Yeah, which I thought was great. I know you didn't love it. He didn't. I thought it was awesome.

I thought everything but what Jack Nicholson did was pretty good. Yeah, you didn't like his performance? No, I really didn't. Wow. Sorry, Jack. He'll forgive that. All right.

Because you like him as an actor, right? Yeah. Oh, OK. Does it get? Come on. Return of the Jedi, 1983, the famous speeder bike chase scene. On Indoor.

Yeah, California's Redwood National Park doubled as Indoor. And that was Garrett Brown walking, and they sped it up. Yeah, but, and you're just like, wow, who cares? The reason why it's such an iconic steadicam shot is because he walked very slowly. And when you speed film up, the tiny movements involved are telegraphed. They just become much more exaggerated.

So without a steadicam, when they sped the film up, again, it would have been just so blurry and just jarring. It would have been unusable. The fact that you can see the trees and stuff, and even at that high speed, it's all steadicam. Yeah, and people, I think, it's just so easy to take it for granted now in movies when you see these shots. But to pioneer these things and this equipment was remarkable.

And nowadays, there are all manner of at-home steadicam. You don't have to do like my brother and build one out of spare parts and door hinges. No. You can buy one. For not too much. You can spend $100 on a decent enough little home steadicam.

This article says that the steadicam curve, which is made for GoPros, is like $100. Yeah, well, those are teeny tiny. And there's one for the iPhone called, what's it called? The smoothie. That one is like, I think, even less than $100. And it's just like a handheld camera stabilizer that works pretty well from what I can gather.

Yeah, we should have had Casey, our video producer, Casey. He's in France right now, though, living the high life. Right, eating baguettes. We should have had Casey in here, just given thumbs up or thumbs down to each one of these brands that we mentioned. And I would trust that is like the gospel truth. But Casey's not here, so we're just

going to say, read online reviews. I also saw that there's a lot of gimbal-based drone steadicams that are just not that expensive. Well, drones, they're changing the game again. Sure. Because then you can do a shot where you follow someone by the swimming pool and then fly up into outer space with them, if you want.

Yeah. In one continuous motion. Yeah, like the Quisp monster. The what? The Quisp monster. You remember the alien from Quisp cereal? Do you remember Quisp? Remember the weird alien?

Sort of. I didn't eat Quisp. Wasn't that a Captain Crunch knock-off? Was it different? It was different, because they were saucer-shaped rather than square waffle cut. Gotcha. Same thing, though, yeah.

Same thing. It was good. It didn't cut the tongue like Captain Crunch did. Yeah, the roof of the mouth. I'll suffer through that still. And then, of course, steadicam is a name brand. Right, like seeing eye dog. Yeah, it's made, who makes it?

Tiffin. Tiffin now? That's what, yeah, I think Tiffin does. They have a pretty good site. Like, if you are at all interested in this, like, they've got a great site, and they have all of their steadicam models with a real in-depth overview of them. And pretty, I think it's got all their manuals and everything

just right there for you to read. Yeah, there's other companies making them. There's one called Glidecam. Embarazum. Yeah, but, you know, steadicam's still probably the giant. It's like dollies. There's only two dolly makers. Or there may be more now, but it's like Chapman and Fisher.

And each, you know, every dolly grip has a preference. Those are the dolly makers? Yeah, Chapman dollies or Fisher dollies. Kind of like a Jamison or Bushmills, you know? Budweiser or Coors? Neither. And then Garrett Brown, as if the steadicam wasn't enough as far as revolutionizing filming goes, he later on invented

something called the Skycam. Yeah. Which, like, if you watch any kind of sporting event now, especially, it's especially useful for football and football, where, like, there's just cables above the field. And there's cameras hanging down that are just, like, doing overhead shots following the action. Like, it's nothing.

It's pretty neat. Garrett Brown invented that, too. I got one more little thing for you. There are two positions, not high mode, low mode. Positions are, like, how you're operating the camera. But if you are pointing forward as the operator and your camera is pointing forward, and you're just walking, it's called missionary.

No. And then if you are, if the operator is forward and the camera is backward, they call that Don Juan. So leave it to film set goons to think of sexual names for sex it up. Camera positions. Don Juan? Yeah, I never heard of that one.

I hadn't either. Well, if you want to know more about Steadycam, including a really, really fine grain involved look at the physics of how the Steadycam arm works, you should go type Steadycam into the search bar, howstefworks.com. Since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this encouragement for my Christian listener.

Hey guys, I was listening to the Easter show and it was compelled right in. As a Christian, I've always appreciated how you make a solid effort to not rail on the church too hard. I found it humorous and simultaneously sad when you felt you had to tiptoe around the pagan traditions that have been integrated with the resurrection. I find it disheartening to think that other believers can't

find anything better to do than wait to be offended by something, then jump all over you for it. But based on your years of experience and careful treatment of the subject, it must be the case a lot of the time. Personally, I just want to say I can't think of anything you've ever said to offend me. I think you've done a stand up job with sensitive subjects

like satanic panic in particular. It's also nice just to hear you talk about things directly related to my beliefs without sneering like many others will. That's nice, Dane, in Minnesota. Yes, for real thing. If you want to get in touch with us like Dane did and be a super cool person, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast.

You can also follow the behind the scenes action of Chucks in My Life at S-Y-S-K podcast on Instagram. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know for the hurt. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. In the meantime, while you're doing all this, hang out with us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit

howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.