Camera Grip Gear - C-Stands Review
Used to be that the one you can unscrew, you can do it with one hand; and that much a lot cooler that how to fuck with these things.
Hi I’m Mike and this is the Film Lab on the substream.com, and today we’re going to start talking about grip equipment. What really excites me― it is because all of the equipment just worked. The film industry is a lot of long days with a lot of smart people who don’t like working with crafty equipment.
So, everything like this C-Stand which is a Century Stand, also known as a Grip Stand. It ends up evolving into like these perfectly elegant pieces of machinery. They’re simple and really, really, really well designed. These things are used for almost everything on film set; they hold flags, they hold lights, you can use them to hold basically anything. They’re really, really strong because they’re not made of like lightweight aluminium to be portable kind of easy to work with, they’re made of steel, they’re really strong and they’re kind of heavy. I love them.
Now when you’re using these things, there are two things that you have to remember, two important little tricks. One of them is going to keep you safe and the other one is going to keep you safe from fire and using the thing wrong. The first thing is going to protect your hands from being broken, has got to do with how you hold a C-Stand.
Now, when everybody picks these things up, off the back of a grip truck or off a rack, the first thing they do, they hold it like this; they grab the middle part. The problem is when you hand out that off to somebody else, they’re going to grab it like this. And they’re going to grab both this part and this part. And they’re going to crash your fingers. And it’s really going to hurt. I know that because I’ve done it. So when you hold the C-Stand, hold the arm and the body of the stand. In that way, there is no crushy-pinchy on your little fingers.
When you’re setting these things up, it’s important to notice that some of them have a little screw here or would be here, if this one had it, it locks the legs close when they’re close and open when they’re open. And this one doesn’t, now this is better because on this the legs just pop in the position. So when you’re using these things, it’s important to remember to set it up in such a way that the arm, the arm being the thing that holds the lamp or the flag or the bounce card or whatever you want to put in it, extends out over the tallest leg.
It’s also important to remember that the knuckle, the knuckle being the thing that holds the arm, is on the right hand side of the stand; when you’re looking at it this way. And that’s important because when it’s set up this way, with the weight on this side, whatever’s here, is going to push down in a righty-tighty fashion; as opposed to a lefty-loosely thing, which eventually crashes down and then the light hits your actress in the face, cuts her face like Mark Campbell on Star Wars although I think he got cut in a motorcycle accident, and you get fired and you have to go home and tell your mom that you got fired because you didn’t know about righty-tighty and lefty-loosely.
And that goes the same for when you’re putting stuff on the end of the iron you want to put it in such a way, that the weight of it pulls down on the right hand side making it more secure not less. The other really important thing which I forgot is that you have to put a sandbag on the tallest leg.