LEARN THE GEARED HEAD

I really enjoy working with geared heads, although I rarely get to use them anymore. Most of my projects can’t afford to rent one for me. Hopefully this will change with the advent of the Gearnex geared head, which I’ve now used on several shoots.
The geared head offers an incredible amount of control over camera moves, especially dolly moves. For some reason it’s very easy to match pan and tilt speeds to a dolly move by spinning wheels rather than moving a pan handle around. The wheels also offer a wide range of possibilities from very subtle adjustments to aggressive camera moves that stop on a dime.
There are a couple of ways to learn the wheels:
(1) Buy, rent or borrow a geared head and strap a laser pointer to it: learn to write your name in light on a wall.
Although this is the most commonly recommend way of learning the wheels, I’m skeptical of this method as it teaches you to write your name in light on a wall—which is something you’ll never do. In my career—approaching 23 years in the film industry—I’ve only once had to follow text with a geared head, while operating second camera on a feature called “No Way Back.” A gang member spray painted words onto the side of a tunnel, and I had to follow his writing in third gear, with no rehearsal, on an 85mm lens. I nailed it, and I’d never done anything like that before.
So, having said that, I’d recommend skipping this technique and moving on to the next two tricks, which I think will help you considerably more:
(2) Buy, rent or borrow a geared head and strap camera to it: follow people around.
Learning to read, and react to, body language is a huge part of operating a camera. You’ll get a lot farther faster if you learn to follow people around and interpret body movement and language through the wheels than you will simply learning the craft of moving the wheels, which is what the laser pointer technique teaches.
(3) In the absence of a geared head, train your brain to do the right thing.
Around the time that I wanted to learn the geared head I read an interesting scientific study. Two high school basketball teams were told to practice plays in different ways: one physically executed the plays for one hour every day for a week, and the other team thought about executing the plays for one hour every day for a week. In the end both teams improved, and they improved about the same amount. Apparently thinking about executing physical moves can have some practical benefit to actually learning those moves.
At the time I was sporadically practicing my geared head moves while working on a TV series. I was a camera assistant, and at lunch I followed the art department around as they redressed the set. I couldn’t do this consistently, though, and reading about this study gave me an idea.
Whenever I watched TV I moved my hands as if I was operating a geared head and executing the move I saw on TV. As the camera moved on the TV, I moved my hands to follow:
Right hand: clockwise (top of wheel rotates to the right) to tilt up, counterclockwise (top of wheel rotates to the left) to tilt down.
Left hand: counterclockwise (top of wheel rotates away) to pan right, clockwise (top of wheel rotates toward me) to pan left.
After a few weeks of TV practice I did a LOT better the next time I got my hands on a geared head.