Hi folks – The DiyDonkey is back again. I’ve tinkered again. I’ve even announced that some tinkering with the profiles will follow . Now I built the first version of a camera crane.

Well – actually I’m already at the second version. In the first version I have something overshot. But slowly and sequentially:
We, here at TwoBearsProductions wanted a camera crane – and of course that is an order! A job for professionals – for me, the DiyDonkey! So I have got caught profiles, and started the miter saw!

Why a camera crane?

If you make videos, you can achieve nice “camera movement” with a camera crane and of course also filming from unusual perspectives is possible. Of course, the crane has to be stable, cost little, and of course it should also be reasonably portable. Examples of such camera cranes are found enough on the internet. Of course I wanted to do someting with my “favorites” the aluminum profiles.

According to my first plan the crane should be movable in two directions, but the camera should not change its direction. That means it should be movable up/down and right/left but always “look” in the same direction. So I built that1:

For a first attempt it looked not bad and also worked pretty well. However, it has been found that my thoughts were probably a bit too much of a good thing. The whole structure with many joints was not as stable as I had hoped and also the thing was a bit too heavy.

So I redesigned the crane in thought and rebuilt it. Now only the up/down movement is stabilized and the direction of the camera is maintained. When moving left/right the camera rotates around the axis of the crane (which is also the case in many commercial systems). The new crane now looks like this.

The advantage is that you need less profiles and the structure at the top is much lighter – ie. the crane is lighter in weight and takes up less counter weights (the counterweights follow the law of thelever!). In addition, the whole thing becomes more stable.

The crane arm is is 2 meters long at the moment. If we extend the tripod to approximately 1.5 meters then we can swing from the ground to a height of about 3 meters – quite remarkable!

We have of course made some test shots at the weekeend in the garden. For this purpose, we have used the GX7. Which is relatively light, and makes great videos – and the crane works quite satisfactory (actually, we should be able to use heavier cameras but we did not try that).

However, the test videos are not so that we want to show them here – so you have to be patient and wait some time.

Bye for now
Your DiyDonkey