How And Why We Designed Our Own Video Product Shot Rig

3 Min Read  ∙

Salute to you all. Challenges in our business are many but just like anything else that has no prior examples, you only have to start and fail, from there you get information to work with moving forward. That’s what exactly happened to us here at Vidiyo In Business (ViB).
Everyone does product shots, using still photography, but we mainly do product video shots until one day we had big set-ups that we couldn’t film well. How can we do video product shots using something that has motion, big enough to fit large set-ups? Straight away I went onto the internet, I found the usual electric photography tables that spin 360 degrees, cake rotators, clay work rotators etc.

As I did more and more research, I realized we didn’t want a rotator with the camera in one place while the product was rotating. We mainly wanted to rotate the camera because we wanted to load this platform with heavy products or wide product compositions like a breakfast setting, raise the camera, lower the camera and we want all of them to fit. Plus, cinematographically speaking, there’s something visually satisfying when you see the environment spin, not just the camera. With that thought, the internet came up short.

Large Product Setting

With anything DIY, budget comes first, but you also have to know exactly what you want and how you want it. Enter Katwe – Metal Works Area. That place is not so sexy when you don’t know anyone to talk to, they can take you for a ride. So first thing I did was scroll through my phonebook to hit up Umar, the fabricator who designed my first ever Sit/Stand Table for Video Editing. Once I approached him with our sketches, we agreed on budgets and without wasting your time, catch everything in the video below.

The ViB-Product Shot Rig. Made in Uganda for the world…at least we think!

PS: If you want to jump to product shots, scroll to the end of the video. In case you want to make your own table and need to know how it works, start from the beginning of the video.
Thank you for your time! Mwebale nnyo!

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