13 Cinematic Gimbal Moves for a Beginner!

In this video, I'm gonna show you a bunch of different gimbal moves that you can use to tell a story. I'll break down how I did each move and go through some thoughts around using a gimbal to craft more interesting stories. All of these moves are from a project that I filmed about an abandoned location that's in the mountains surrounding Los Angeles. You can find the full video from the story on my second channel, which is linked down below in the description. While filming, I used a gimbal to explore this canyon and all of the remaining structures that are being swallowed by nature. And using a gimbal helped give me a little motion to all the shots that I used for my B-roll. So for this shot, we're walking up to where the story takes place and everything's graffitied on the way up. So I wanna use my gimbal to show like walking and actually experiencing the graffiti as we walk through it. So I just have a 20 millimeter on and I'm gonna just walk kind of a straight line and follow this path to give you that feeling that the gimbal is you as a viewer. Okay, that was a cool shot. What I wanna get is just a little bit more on the graffiti. So I'm gonna do the same thing, walking back up. It's the fun part about making videos, back and forth. But I'm gonna point just down at the ground just so I have a quick cutaway to show all this graffiti as we walk up. Okay, so there's like this power line up here with a bunch of shoes, kind of ominous, I don't know. It's kind of a weird look, just something I wanna capture for the story. I might use it, but the way that they're positioned up on the telephone wire, I'm gonna walk forward while I'm gonna be pointing the gimbal up and I wanna rotate around and come back down. So you're seeing both sides of this street and kind of where we're at in this environment and just trying to come up with something creative so I'm not always doing the same types of shots where it's like pushing forward and walking or just a side shot. And so I'm gonna put it into tilt lock. I'm gonna use the joystick, do the movement as I walk. Okay, so there's a cool perspective. I'm up on this like mountaintop and I'm gonna use the gimbal to be kind of like a drone shot, but up high. So for this shot, I have this cool downward perspective because I'm up on this cliff and I can tilt the camera up to really show this scene. And so instead of like physically moving with the gimbal, I'm just using it as a super steady way to hold the camera and then just doing a nice tilt up. So we got to a cool location with this big water tower, a staircase off in the distance and just a lot of visual components that I wanna use for the video. And so the shot that I'm gonna do is a push forward and a tilt up. And this is going to kind of show the space, but from this perspective where you're looking up at how big things are. How I'm gonna perform this move is I'm gonna be walking forward with the gimbal, but then I'm also gonna be tilting up on the gimbal at the same time. And I'm gonna try to keep those two movements smooth and in sync so you get this floating feeling as you look up. And so you can see how the trees have grown around where this rusted water tower is. Okay, so for this shot, we got to a location, it's a house over here that's completely dilapidated and falling apart. But I just wanna get a few panning shots of the location cause I'm gonna use it for the story. And so I'm gonna, this is a really simple move, but it works really well. And it's something that when you're out filming, it's great to always get these nice pans. So just starting from one side of the scene and then working my way over, I don't just twist the gimbal. I usually use like a whole body rotation because that helps just smooth out the shot and make it look super fluid and cinematic. One thing when you're working with gimbals is you gotta overly be smooth with everything. So it might feel like you're getting a super smooth shot, but when you actually get into the edit and you're like, you're doing this, moving around, things are a lot more jerky. And so what I found is that I just have to be overly slow with everything that I do to get that smoothness that I really want. Now a hack to that is put in 120 frames per second and then you can be a little bit faster and then really smooth it down later. Okay, so let me get one other shot here. Pans are great, but all this barbed wire is something I talk about in this video a lot. And this is a cool spot where I can get really close to this barbed wire and it's all twisted and curled around. So I'm using my 20 millimeter and I'm gonna get right up on this barbed wire, use a close focus and I just wanna follow it as it goes along the fence. And it could be a cool thing to use in the story. I'm gonna swap over to manual focus. I wanna bring that focus pretty close and I'm using super wide lens so you get that distorted perspective. And I'm gonna swap over to 120 frames per second to this and I'm doing my best just to use the gimbal to follow the barbed wire as I move. And I have it in follow mode so it's gonna tilt as I tilt, it's gonna pan as I pan and I'm just gonna work my way around this crazy texture of the trees and the barbed wire and try not to get caught by it while I'm moving past it. So the shot that I wanna get now is walking through these trails. There's lots of cool textures and just the trail kinda goes in and out of all these trees so I wanna show that as I'm hiking through. So I'm gonna do a point of view perspective. I'm gonna put the gimbal in the tilt lock mode and I'm actually gonna hold it kind of like a flashlight. So I'm gonna be completely vertical with the gimbal and that allows me to move when I'm walking up and down and let it not bounce as much and also I can rotate back and forth. And with this gimbal, the new design with this base, it actually gives you a little bit of a wrist support when you do this. So it's useful. And I'm basically gonna follow the trail as we move through and the idea is that I can either play this in real time or I could speed this up and make a hype lapse out of it showing me moving quick through this landscape. One of the shots that I always wanna get when I'm working with a gimbal is just the push in. And so basically I just set the camera forward. I'm in lock mode or I use tilt lock depending on if I end up turning or not but majority of the time, lock mode is the way to go. And then just walking without any bobbing with the camera. That's the hardest thing when it comes to working with a gimbal is getting all of that up and down bobbing motion because gimbals are smooth but they're not gonna fix that. So you wanna sit down low, kind of like squat position in a way and then you're gonna just move really slowly. And the idea is that you don't want your arm to move up and down. Essentially your arm is becoming the Z axis and it's gonna take practice but that is one of those things that you just learn and it's gonna help smooth out the shot so much. Now I didn't wanna do another one of these shots but I'm gonna have the camera pointed up as I go up these staircases. There's 500 stairs to get down to this canyon floor. So I wanna show that in a few different ways. So I'm gonna use lock mode. I'm gonna go up the stairs, I'm gonna go down the stairs, just a bunch of different shots of stairs that I could use throughout the video. For this shot, I'm gonna use like a jib like shot. So I'm gonna start down low and then raise the camera up way up into the sky to kind of give that like floating camera feel. And this is a, was a farm or something but it's a cool thing to show like all these ruins over here. And so I'll start down low and then it reveals what's way up above. Let's do this. So that shot looks cool but I'm also just gonna get a shot from like way up in the sky and like moving around this space because I don't know what I'll use for the edit and how much time I need. But it might just be cool to see it from a higher perspective than the reveal. Whenever I'm doing these videos, you never know exactly which B-roll makes sense. If it's a scene where you wanna reveal something or if it's a scene where you're just cutting fast so you just need quick shots. So it's good when you have time to just get options and try some different things that could be used in the edit. Okay, for this next shot, I wanna create an orbit. This is a move I like to use all the time when I'm flying a drone but you can do the same type of thing with a gimbal. And the powerhouse is a big part of the story. It's down here. And so I wanna create this big kind of arcing, swinging motion where it's in the background and you have some trees foregrounded and it just, it kind of shows the area and it shows how nature is kind of integrated in with all these ruins. So I'm gonna start over here. I'm gonna make sure that I'm locked my focus on the powerhouse because that's what I want to be in focus and I don't want it bouncing. And I'm gonna kind of point this way and then I'm gonna swing around. So it's a little bit more of a orbit than having your subject centered. And when I get my subject completely centered, then I'm gonna lock onto it. So kind of a cool shot that mixes a reveal with also an orbit action. Now, if you wanna watch the video about this abandoned place I'll link to it here on the left. But if you want some more filmmaking tips that are gonna help you with your videos, make sure you click this video here on the right. I'll see you on the next one.