For as long as companies have been selling tools to assist the filmmaker, people have been exploring ways to accomplish the same thing better, faster, cheaper... and in today's day and age of anybody-can-be-an-indie-filmmaker, they usually focus on 'cheaper' :) This page chronicles my humble adaptation of the many DIY designs floating about the internet.

This article isn't intended as a complete building guide...I really just wanted to chronicle some of the unique aspects of the stabilizer I put together. If you decide to copy what I've done here, I just ask that you give a little credit to 'YB2Normal' and send them over to my site to check out my other work. To be clear however, I take no credit for the physics behind why this works, or even the overall design. Really I only consider three aspects of the design original... the PVC gimbal, the use of all-thread for the main tube, and the wooden camera x-y plate. Putting together my own steadicam represented some unique challenges... I had seen many references to the '$14 Steadicam' on the internet, and I have to applaud the grace with which Johnny has dealt with the know-it-alls who feel compelled to point out the limitations of the design... read his FAQ and you'll get a small sense of his patience and sense of humor. (These are links to his college website, please mail me if he graduates and the links get broken) My budget was a bit higher than $14 and I wanted to put something together that emulated, as best as a homebrew project could, the design of the commercial steadicam. To that end I trolled the internet and discovered a whole community of amateur filmmakers, physics nerds, and cheap folk like myself who just had to see if they could build a camera stabilizer for less than the cost of a compact car. The successes I found on the internet, and the elegance with which folks have done it, inspired me to do the same.