Improvise a dolly

Stanley Kubrick immortalised cinema's use of the Steadicam in The Shining (1980). His tracking shots of little Danny Torrance on his tricycle, peddling down the corridors of the Overlook Hotel are some of the most suspenseful scenes in the film, if not in cinema history. An effective Steadicam system is very hard to improvise, but here's how you can approximate some of the shots in The Shining.

The IMDB notes that Garrett Brown, the Steadicam operator in The Shining, "accomplished many of the ultra-low tracking corridor sequences from a wheelchair on which his invention was mounted. Grips would either pull backward or push forward the wheelchair, depending on the requirement of the shot". If you have a wheelchair to hand, this is one option. Alternatively, like us, you could use a £50 trolley.

A traditional dolly looks something like a toy train. The camera rides on a carriage along a track that's laid down in advance along a specific route. The camera operator will usually ride on the carriage with a camera, while an assistant drags the train along the track at the required speed.

Some dolly shots do not use a track. Instead, they rely on the floor in your location being smooth enough to eliminate camera shake. These kind of trackless dolly shots are called 'dancefloor moves'.

We'll assume you don't have a Kubrick-sized budget at your disposal, so what can you do to achieve the classy look of a camera dolly shot? For starters, you'll probably have to use the dancefloor technique, because building a DIY track and carriage is hard work.

To create our dolly in the picture, we've used a standard trolley -- the kind of thing you'd use to move boxes around. Perch on the trolley and get a friend to drag it along. You might have to practice the shot several times to get it right.

You can rely on the surface at your location, or you can use plywood sheets and gaffer tape to smooth the floor the trolley is running across. If you put some care into this approach, you should be able to shoot a tracking shot closely matching one produced by a dolly costing thousands of pounds.