With thoughts of the upcoming music video and more slitscan effects I remembered a camera rig design I found on vimeo a long time ago.  It’s called “the sphere arm” and it was designed by a fellow named Edwin Bont.  He built it for the sole purpose of filming insects in macro.  It’s a pretty novel design.  It’s built from two L-brackets of equal length bolted together and then connected to a 2X4.  The camera is mounted in a way so that it points directly at the center of where the two pivot points meet.  This is where you place your subject for filming.  What it allows you to do is fly the camera in an almost 360 degree sphere around your subject all the while keeping the focal distance constant.

It’s pretty cool.  My build is a little larger than Edwins and definitely not perfect.  There is some shifting that happens when flying around but I still captured some pretty cool imagery.  The reason I built it was due to my recent slitscan experiments (horizontal and vertical).  I think the movement that this rig is capable of might be interesting once sent through the slitscan factory. For the music video I’d like to build a larger version, large enough for a persons head and shoulders to fit in the center

You can check out a bit of the footage I captured below. I shot at 60fps and conformed it to 24fps slomo in order to make the movement smoother.  Also you can see Edwin Bonts video of his creation in action as well.