Steadicam Blooper

Let me set the scene for you, dear readers...

It's the 2001 Columbia Festival of the Arts, and the "big ticket" for the festival is the performance by a group of Cuban dancers. As you well know, El Presidente Castro doesn't just go about casually letting his subjects travel outside of his dominion, because, dag nab it, seems like every time he does a bunch of them decide to not come back. Driving around in 1950s era cars may seem wonderfully romantic to us, but when it's your only option it gets old in a hurry. Or so I'm told.

At any rate, the dancers were here, and we were hired by their state-side promoter to put together a nice promo video for them. So we shot the live show with multiple cameras, and scheduled a shoot the next day to get steadicam shots on the stage, shots impossible to get during the live show, being that there's a universal law that whenever there's a steadicam operator around he or she automatically upstages anything else going on. I suspect this is due to the seemingly magical qualities of steadicam, making the camera float weightless in space. (It is not, in fact weightless, of course, being tragically unable to defy the laws of physics. "Hey, duuude! Is that thing heavy?" "No, no, not at all...I always sweat like this...")

One of the impressive things about this dance group is that the woman are all fairly uniform in size, and move in graceful, coordinated lines. Kind of like the Rockettes, but with a smoldering sensuality that tempts American camera men to contemplate offering refuge in the good 'ol U.S. of A. via a marriage visa. So it's not entirely surprising that while trying the thread the needle, so to speak, through their intricate patterns, this happened -


Oops.

No one was seriously injured, thank goodness, and due to my razor-sharp negotiating skills an international incident was narrowly avoided. If you step through the video you can see a frame where her ear is pressed up against the lens of the camera. This was a full-sized steadicam, not one of the dinky consumer rigs, and I suspect her bell was ringing for a while after the collision. But she was a good sport, and as a small gesture to make it up to her I've been smuggling her parts of a 1976 Ford Maverick, one piece at a time.

Just another day in the life of yours truly.

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