Vincent Laforet loves his toys. I mean really loves his toys. He even has a section on his site called ‘toys’. You’ll often see him in a steadicam vest or with a 5D attached to a helicopter gunship with another couple of DSLRs daisy chained to a 60ft pendulum swinging over a cliff. No. I exaggerate. Still, he likes to add stuff to his DSLRs. And who wouldn’t? That’s half the fun, and for me it’s been one of the great appeals of this garden shed bodge technology. I must admit, I like my toys too, and have been fortunate to be able to film with huge jib arms, steadicams, gyro-mount helicopters, underwater cameras but sadly not motion control yet. Vincent got a lot of shit for posting pics of his DSLR rigs with billions of parts attached, but I’m not ashamed to admit I knew what they all were and have used them myself. I’ll also say that when you’re shooting high-end work (as the big V tends to do) then all of those bits, every single one of them, is vital to retaining control over what you’re doing, to the satisfaction of very demanding clients. And so, Vincent, this post’s for you, as we put our own little toy rig together to shoot the opening sequence of Ladies and Gentlemen. On Saturday night we took the 5D out into the heart of buzzing Soho at kicking out time attached to a Steadicam Flyer rig. We would have had a full rig, but my operator has literally just sold his. Shame. Anyway, here’s the monster we created. Zacuto rails, Redrock DSLR baseplate, Zeiss ZF 35mm, fully modified by Duclos (you need lenses with stops on the barrel to calibrate the follow focus properly), a wireless transmitter and a Bartek wireless follow focus. We were abused by drunks, interfered with by jobsworth production folk trying to tell us how to do our work, and generally messed about by the public in general, but you kind of have to expect that! We had no lights so it was just au naturel and we’ll have to see how it turns out but all in all, for a complicated sequence, I think it’s worked pretty well.

Toys are supposed to be fun. And this was.