Dolly Grip

Anyone who has filmed or watched home movies is familiar with the tremulous look of handheld footage: When you hold a camera in your hand, what you get are children’s birthday parties and family vacations that look as though they took place in the middle of an earthquake.

Professional Filmmakers avoid the “shaky screen” effect by mounting their cameras on tripods, stabilizers, cranes, and dollies to isolate them from Camera Operators ’ natural body movements.

As a Dolly Grip, you’re exclusively in charge of the dollies. Not Barbies, but rather hefty carts that hold the camera and the Camera Operator as they move along a pre-laid track. Cameras often are mounted on these carts during the course of filming scenes in a movie — especially moving or tracking scenes, which are scenes that follow characters or objects as they move through their environment — because they allow the Camera Operator to more fluidly move the camera as it follows its subject (without those pesky bumps and jiggles).

Like other Grips, Dolly Grips are paid to move and set up the equipment on film sets. Your focus as the “dolly” guy or gal, however, is singular: You place, level, and move the dolly track, then push and pull the dolly cart during filming.

Hired by the head Grip, known as the Key Grip, Dolly Grips spend their days doing a delicate dance along a cinematic train track: You’ve got to know where to go, when to start, when to stop, and at what speed to move, all in pursuit of the perfect — and perfectly steady — shot!