A home-made Film Dolly and experience of a commercial one

You need a Dolly. Not one with two eyes, a nose and a mouth, but one with three or four wheels.

In the club where I was once a member (many moons ago), it was decided that a dolly was very necessary. We thought about making one and there were various design ideas, some good and some rather impractical. One was really good, but the materials would be expensive. So we thought about it.

One Saturday morning before we had a chance to start to work on this, or any other idea, a member came in with a triangular piece of heavy laminated board with a caster fitted to each corner, it proved to be more useful for just moving the tripod around than for tracking shot!

Most projects started on Saturdays and, at times, took up a whole day. We would usually have a pub lunch to break up the day, for a lot of hard work was done by the few members who also enjoyed themselves. There came a rattling down the steps and in walked Paul. “Here we are”, he said, “this will make a fme dolly! . It was an old railway platform trolley, the type that was once used by railway porters, but it had iron wheels and we thought it would be a bumpy ride. Sure enough, came the day when we tried it out, it rattled on concrete, made a terrible noise on a wooden floor and was quite unsteady.
We were shooting in a rather sleazy area of London at the time and the confounded
 

thing was stolen from us. We made a few enquiries in the local pub: “Has anyone seen our dolly” only produced a few chuckles and some humorous cracks from

customers as they knocked back their pints! We later discovered it behind a market stall where a boy had rattled it across the cobbles. In the end we came to the conclusion that it was more suitable for carrying equipment about than for what turned out to be very unsteady, useless tracking shots.

We decided that we had to work on the design we’d thought about before, especially as Paul produced four beautiful shining fourteen-inch-diameter spoked wheels that had very smart white pneumatic tyres. Using Dexion for the main frame and a few strong planks, we set to work and spent the whole of one Saturday making a splendid dolly - it was steady and quiet running. It only

an in a straight line, but we decided that that was all we needed. It worked well and was large enough for the camera man to sit comfortably while two people gently moved it along. Of course, the floor had to be smooth and it was best on composite or wood blocks. But we also used it outside running on levelled long boards. This was used for a few years, but I don’t know what happened to it in the end; maybe it became a trolley!

On one occasion, it was decided by general agreement that we could hire some professional equipment. We had made a good profit on sponsored documentaries, so we went to town rather! Building the set was great fun and, by the time it was finished, it was so realistic that it had atmosphere. Then we hired an Elemack “Spyder” Dolly! It had large wheels and a balanced arm that moved hydraulically up and down with the camera and a seat for the camera operator. The bank of various lights that we hired were very good, but I thought we could have managed just as well without the Elemack. It seemed an unnecessary expense to me at the time, for I thought being able to go up and down as well as moving along did nothing for the shot; and we only used it for one shot which was not even used in the end. But it was interesting to see how this amazing accessory worked.
 
 
 
  Jon Woolmer