LookOut! Interactive Camera Gimbal Controller for Filming Long Takes

Abstract

The job of a camera operator is challenging, and potentially dangerous, when filming long moving camera shots. Broadly, the operator must keep the actors in frame while safely navigating around obstacles and while fulfilling an artistic vision. We propose a unified hardware and software system that distributes some of the camera operator’s burden, freeing the operator up to focus on safety and aesthetics during a take. Our real-time system provides solo operators with end-to-end control so that they can balance on-set responsiveness to action against planned storyboards and framing while looking where they are going. By default, we film without a field monitor. Our LookOut system is built around a lightweight commodity camera gimbal mechanism, with heavy modifications to the controller, which would normally just provide active stabilization. Our control algorithm reacts to speech commands, video, and a premade script. Specifically, our automatic monitoring of the live video feed saves the operator from distractions. In preproduction, an artist uses our graphical user interface (GUI) to design a sequence of high-level camera “behaviors.” Those can be specific, based on a storyboard, or looser objectives, such as “frame both actors.” Then, during filming, a machine-readable script, exported from the GUI, ties together with the sensor readings to drive the gimbal. To validate our algorithm, we compared tracking strategies, interfaces, and hardware protocols and collected impressions from (a) filmmakers who used all aspects of our system and (b) filmmakers who watched footage filmed using LookOut.