More Equipment Research for the SR3: The Focus Ring and Focus Whip

On Thursday, and in preparation for our rather difficult shoot for ACTION!, Lynley, Nathan and I practised a couple of shots that required securing Nathan. Since we never before had to secure a camera operator, but felt that we needed to practise it, we asked our technician whether he would help us and offer suggestions.

In the studio, both Nathan and I repeatedly practised the tracking back shot which would literally require Nathan to track back, while simultaneously filming, looking through the viewfinder and adjusting focus. While it turned out to be an easy practise for me securing Nathan by his belt and taking care that we hit both markers for the first and second position, it turned out that Nathan’s job was much more difficult. Either the shots seemed to be shaky or out of focus, even after a couple of practise rounds. If we only could delegate one of those tasks to someone else…

Which got me thinking whether the college had a focus ring that would go with the Arri SR3 – and it does! After a quick question and a couple of minutes in the stores, our technician returned with rails (or rods), a focus ring, and a focus whip and demonstrated attaching all these to the camera.

However, since the rails could not be screwed in at the front of the SR3 due to a missing screw, we provisionly attached the rails to the front with the help of the attached hinge and lots and lots of camera tape. We then attached the focus ring on it, making sure that the teeth of the ring married up with the teeth on the focus ring on the lens instead of its aperture ring, and finally attached the focus whip as an extension on the focus ring.

Once everything was set up, we did another practise round, this time with the additional help of Hannah, whose responsibility would be focus pulling whilst Nathan was tracking back. With this setup, it was way easier for us to pull off the shot that Lynley had envisioned as everyone could concentrate on a single task.

And whilst we will have to wait for the footage to come back from the lab in order to inspect it for shakiness, we all decided that this would be the way to go about on our shoot and I made a mental note to myself to also book it out for the Sweeney Todd production.