Get Your Gear Under Control with This DIY Production Cart
Production carts can cost a pretty penny, so why not try assembling your own for a fraction of the cost?
On many no-budget film sets, equipment is usually stored not on a beautifully organized equipment cart with labels and holders and stuff but in a mountainous pile that is less functional than a dumbbell in space. Storing your gear this way will not only waste a lot of your time but it'll also drive you nuts as you try to find and put away all the equipment you'll need throughout the day.
If you don't have the budget to buy a professional production cart, you can always make your own—kind of. The team over at The Film Look shows you how to customize a common (and affordable) utility cart with all of the storage space and accessories you'll need to organize and access your most important pieces of filmmaking gear. Check out the tutorial below:
Professional production carts can set you back upwards of $1000, which is why the utility cart used in the video, which costs about $70 on Amazon, is such an attractive option. It's made of metal and you get three tiers of storage space to place your camera gear, lenses, batteries, charging stations, and other random tools you might need. The one drawback I can see, however, are those tiny wheels that may not do so well at rolling over cables and other obstacles, or not as well as the 8" wheels on pro models would, anyway.
The Film Look team customizes their cart with soft carpeting to help keep gear in place, labels for all equipment (lenses, chargers, batteries, etc.), DIY dividers, and cans mounted to the side of the cart for pens and other tools. Of course, you can customize your cart whichever way makes sense to you, or even purchase several carts and customize each one for different departments, including DIT/video village, lighting/electrical, hell, even a snack cart would be well worth the cost. However you decide to utilize your DIY production cart, the main idea is to give yourself and your crew a functional, organized, and affordable way to store gear while working on set.
Do you use a DIY production cart on set? How did you set it up? Let us know down in the comments.
Source: The Film Look
