3D Printing a Colossal Camera Arm to Capture More Professional Shots
Purchasing a camera arm like this would have cost thousands of dollars, but Alexandre Chappel was able to build his own on a budget.
Even though blockbuster movies these days have budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars, cameras and the various kinds of tripods and dollies used on those sets aren’t usually purchased specifically for a particular movie. Instead, they’re owned by either the production studio or a third party that rents them out. The reason for that is that professional movie cameras, along with all of the equipment needed to utilize them, are very expensive. Most amateurs and hobbyists are never going to be able to afford to purchase them. But with a little ingenuity, you can approximate that gear on a budget. Alexandre Chappel did that by using 3D-printed parts to build a massive camera arm.
Digital camera technology has come a really long way in recent years — so much so that you can get a camera on a hobbyist budget that is very nearly as good as a professional camera. But that camera is just one item among many that you’d need to actually capture decent video. You will, at the very least, need a sturdy tripod. That’s what Chappel was using, but it was inconvenient to move around his shop when he wanted to frame different shots for his build videos. A simple tripod also just isn’t capable of positioning the camera in every way that Chappel wanted. What he needed was a large camera arm on a wheeled base, but those can cost thousands of dollars. Chappel’s solution was to build his own using 3D-printed parts.
The camera arm that Chappel designed is about seven feet tall and has a reach of about three and a half feet. Hardened rods or rails, like the kind you’d use for a 3D printer or CNC machine, would have been incredibly expensive at this scale. That’s why Chappel used square aluminum tube instead. Two parallel tubes are used for each axis, and are held in place using 3D-printed frame mounts. The carriages are also 3D-printed and slide along the rails on bearings. The vertical axis has a precise counter weight, which makes it effortless to slide the rails and reposition the camera. The entire arm is attached to a base that has a trio of casters. Put that all together, and Chappel has a camera arm that can be rolled to any location in his shop in just seconds. If you want to build your own, he has even made all of his design files available for download.