My DIY Movie Gear Prototypes...

I'm starting off this Blog because I need to put down and make available all the work I've done on some diy movie gear. As you can probably guess, I love movies and it's been 17 years now that I'm trying to make one that's worth viewing, even if it's a very short one.

However, let's talk about the gear...

Over the last couple of years I've been developing two prototypes: a wireless Follow Focus and a motorized PC-controlled 4-axis Dolly/Slider, both based on some sort of Arduino boards.

This development has been driven by the desire to use professional level gear, normally accessible only to guys that make movies for a living.

In the end I’ve been able to use the first version of the prototypes on two projects of mine as Director: the short movie Treasure of Gods (2013) and the trailer/teaser of Fischia il Vento by Alessandro D'Alessandro (in post-production).

Back to work…

WIRELESS FOLLOW FOCUS

The following video shows my WFF at work. I hope to have more time in the future in order to upload a better quality one...

The baby crying off screen is my 2-month-old daughter Adele...

THE TRANSMITTER

The WFF is composed by a transmitter and a receiver.

The transmitter mounts an Arduino UNO R3, with an Xbee wireless module mounted on a shield on top.

On the top surface of the controller there is:

• A large knob controlling the rotation of a potentiometer used to read the manual rotation of the operator to be transmitted to the receiver

• A small knob used to limit the range of possible readings in order to suit the movement to the different lens mounted on the camera.

• A led indicator push button switch to power up the module.

• A lever switch that sets the mode of operation of the follow focus (Manual Live controlled or Memory Controlled)

• 3 push buttons used to store the current position of the knob

• 3 led indicators to give visual feedback when the positions have been stored

The Transmitter is powered by a lilliput sony F970 Battery plate and a 7.2 sony battery.

And here is the link to the Transmitter Arduino source code:

THE RECEIVER

The receiver is composed by a chipKIT Uno32 board, an Xbee module mounted on a shield on top of it and a SilentStepStick - Trinamic TMC2100 Stepper Motor Driver.

I went for the ChipKIT Uno 32 instead of the Aduino Uno r3 board due to its higher performance in terms of Processor speed rate and bus size (32bit Microchip - PIC32MX320F128 Processor, up to 80MHz clock speed, 128K flash, 16K SRAM).

The board allowed me to run the motor at a rate as high as 29000 steps/s.

But I had to limit the speed in the code to avoid any torque issue on the stepper motor.

Here is the link to the receiver source code I developed. Note that the code rely on the fantastic AccelStepper library