Whenever I help out other people on shoots, it absolutely amazes me how much time is wasted. I will show up, and it may be 2 hours or more before we start to shoot anything. A large portion of that time is wasted messing around with getting gear setup. While, it does take time to prep gear, there are plenty of ways to make this process go faster so that you can get shooting faster. The biggest way is investing into gear that is portable, and quick to setup. Kessler Crane is our goto company for anything related to camera motion. The biggest reason is that it only takes 1 person to setup and operate their equipment, and while we always have several people on crew during shoots, the extra speed makes a big difference. A traditional dolly can take 45 minutes to an hour to setup (painful), I can have our Kessler dolly setup and ready to go in less than 2 minutes.
I’m very excited about their new Kwik release system. No we are able to have a quick release to all of our cranes, dollies, etc, which makes setup and tear down time signifiicantly faster. For example, to screw on a revolution head onto a slider, and then switch from that to a tripod head would take 5-10 minutes. Now it takes a matter of seconds to switch.
We use quick releases on every piece of gear possible now. We also really love the zacuto q mounts and zamerican arms.
I can confidently say that this approach saves hours every day, which means more shots accomplished and happier clients.
Time is money… don’t waste it.
