A general note on stabilization
Number one: You do need it unless all of your movie either have no moving camera (except panning, tilting, zooming) or they are all supposed to look like The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield.
Number two: It’s cheap to get
Handheld shots without any kind of stabilization will make your life unnecessarily hard unless you want to have that shaky Blair Witch Project look in all of your films. Especially in action films you will typically not have all static shots but cameras moving with the subjects (people fighting, running, shooting). There are unlimited cheap ways (check this out for example) to achieve reasonable stabilization and cheesycam is full of ideas or look around on youtube for an hour.
Shoulder rig
- Good for shots where the camera person doesn’t have to move too quickly but follows the subject by panning and tilting. Even the cheapest solution gives you results comparable in quality to some shoulder cam shots you see in professional TV or film productions. As long as you don’t have enough money for a good tripod, this is IMHO your best options for stuff like dialog scenes where you follow your subjects’ movements.
- Easy on the camera person, i.e. it is usually OK to hold such a thing for a few hours (with breaks, of course)
- Easy to build if you’re a DIY person
- Really simple ones even affordable when you buy them new (but they become crazy expensive when you get to companies like Zacuto and I think you can spend that kind of money on other things if money is short, not saying that they don’t offe value for money but IMHO for the beginner this is mostly convenience at a high price)
Cheap “Steadicam”-like stabilizer
- Good for shots where the camera person has to move around with the subject or move around to simulate the point of view of a moving subject. It’s surprising how usable shots are even with a cheap DIY solution even when the camera person is running
- The arm gets tired quickly depending on the physique of your camera person and the weight of your camera and counter-weights (again one thing that is good about really small cameras)
- Easy to build if you’re a DIY person
Cage
A bit inbetween shoulder rig and stabilizer as it is
- Better for moving with the action (walking, running) than a shoulder rig but still
- Easy on the camera person as it is typically a lot lighter than a stabilizer with weights
- Still good enough for some tilting and panning
- Very good for filming in tight spots (car, subway)
- Attaching external microphones and lights to it makes it a very powerful one-person guerilla filming kit
lowbudgetactionfilms 