Glide Track - The portable dolly system

We set ourselves the challenge of shooting some high-end idents with next to no budget.  We knew what look we wanted to achieve but the challenge was creating it.

While we were knocking ideas around on how we would do this, we heard that the guys over at fstoppers.com were holding their annual BTS video contest. Fstoppers.com is a great resource for BTS videos and I highly recommend you check them out.

Behind The Scenes – Making Of ‘Grolsch Idents’ from Curtis & Kar Productions on Vimeo.

As you will see in our BTS video, we built one set, lit it, and then tweaked the lighting to get nine different looks. We filmed the final packshot for each ident first. This consisted of a slow forward track towards the bottle, moving no more than 1ft on the slider. Simple enough in theory but with the added weight of a Marshall monitor on the camera, the centre balance is soon thrown off. I usually tend to point one of the tripod legs in the same direction that you are gliding to prevent the whole thing tumbling over. In this case, we added a small lighting stand to the other end to add more support. Then it’s down to the operator’s hand movement.

For the standard horizontal glides we mounted the Glidetrack directly to a Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod and placed a Manfrotto 501 head on top.

Moving on to the mid and close-up shots, we used the 50mm 1.2L for the mid and the 100mm 2.8 Macro for the close ups. Again, we used the Glidetrack horizontally but this time we utilised the whole 1m length, tracking from one end of the slider to the other while keeping the bottle in the same part of the frame.

For the close ups we wanted to follow the bottle up and down vertically, starting with a black screen and rising from the bottom of the bottle to the top and then back down again. We didn’t have a jib, which may have been the easier option, so we placed the Glidetrack vertically to get the shots we needed. Once the Glidetrack was placed vertically, we used the Manfrotto 410 geared head to level off the camera.

May I add that if, like us, you are using the 100mm 2.8 macro lens, then you are going to get a lot of camera shake. We added sand bags to the tripod to make it as solid as possible. Or if you can afford it, get the Image Stabilised version.

 Overall, the HD Glidetrack is a very versatile piece of kit – one that we take with us to pretty much every job. In this case, we used it for every shot. It’s perfect for adding that little bit of depth to what would normally be a static and boring shot.

Curtis & Kar is a production company run by two DOP’s. Myself – James Kar (@jameskar) – and fellow DOP, Edmund Curtis (@edmundcurtisdop).