This post is not a fresh piece of news, however I promised a few friends of mine to share some details about my first timelapse dolly prototype. Actually I designed it in march, 2010 and the production was done about in the middle of May. Since that time I had a chance to test a dolly once at home and give it a serious shot working on Walim Timelapse. Also I shot a lot of non-timelapse footage using it.

The idea behind the project was to create an affordable timelapse dolly and get the necessary experience. I decided to use an alu truss track, custom build the cart and drive it using a motor harvested from my old Meade DS80 mount with a Meade 497 controller. The idea of the build was inspired by some solutions described at timescapes.org forum and an “intermediate dolly” by Tom Lowe.

The truss is very lightweight and comes in modular construction allowing me to choose the proper length of the track for a shot and keep the whole thing portable. I have 3 parts of a track, each 1.5m long, which gives me a total travel length of 4.5m. The whole thing is supported by a few photographic tripods.

The dolly is capable of working either in driven timelapse mode as well as in a free push-pull mode for realtime shooting.

Here are some files related to the design (in Polish):

1. LookyCreative_TimelapseDollyDesign.pdf
2. LookyCreative_TimelapseDollyDesign_Details_1.pdf
3. LookyCreative_TimelapseDollyDesign_Details_2.pdf
4. LookyCreative_TimelapseDollyDesign_Details_3.pdf

And here are some initial shots showing the dolly prototype that I tested in May.

The conclusion is that the dolly works. The first test footage (also shot in May) proves the concept.

In June I had a great opportunity to test the dolly in the field:

The result was just a few sequences that I put together also playing with some post production giving the final effect of orbiting, pivoting, crane and standard dolly shots.

The dolly did a great job also during a few shootings, especially in huge halls of Dozamel where I shot the following film for Rialex Crane Systems. I also used it in Cracow during my recent timelapse gig.

There are a few final issues and conclusions:

• I am having a bit of instability (visible on test footage) due to not perfectly rounded wheels (easy to fix).
• There are some issues with the drive, mainly because the Meade drive sometimes goes crazy and the drives to jam from time to time.
• There joints are a bit tricky, as usually, however it seems to work.
• Probably the traction should be improved.

Now, as the dolly paid the bills I am thinking about a new, improved solution – this will be all CNC, top-quality, 2.5m long custom made timelapse dolly and I’ll post about it shortly.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2010 at 19:13. It is filed under Blog, Gear and tagged with dolly, gear, moco, motion control. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed.