Walking Slowly with Steadicam
There are a lot of factors at play here, as many have stated before (and I’m sure many will continue to state after me!). To move slowly with the Steadicam with any level of precision is actually quite difficult and one of the more difficult skills to master. There is an immense amount of physicality that must be mastered, including skills that aren’t trained anywhere else, and a lot of variation depending on how you operate and your equipment.
I think there are 4 real issues that plague slow movements, and I’ll address them separately.
First is vertical translation from the operators hips transferring through the arm. The truth of all arms is that there is a certain frequency that they can absorb the movement of. Almost any arm, no matter how rudimentary, can absorb the movement of an operator jumping up and down. But an arm with too much friction will transfer slower vertical movements into the rig. All arms have some degree of friction (unless you’re operating Steadicam inside of a physics textbook), so there will always be some speed of raise or lower that the arm will transfer into a vertical rise and fall of the sled. Because of the way a human’s hips rise and fall as they walk, you then sometimes will get a rise and fall of the camera as the operator shifts weight from leg to leg. There are many solutions to this - the exovest’s pivoting hip sections are one, the flat-hipped walk that many like Larry McConkey have mastered is another. This type of motion is accentuated by close foreground elements, as they will move far more than the background, and “give away” the movement. So eliminating foreground elements or finding a way to move past them elegantly can often make the difference between a usable shot and one that looks amateurish.
The next issue that can be visible is side to side sway. When humans transfer weight from one leg to the other, they must center their body over that leg to avoid falling down. Imagine standing on one leg off to the side - it doesn’t work! So, as we transfer our weight from one leg to the other, our torsos naturally tend to drift from side to side. You’ve probably noticed this in actors when doing closeups - with every step they tend to “wobble” from one side to another. Especially if doing a shot with any door frames or other “portals” within it, this side to side movement becomes obvious. The best way to work around this is to be gentle with how you swing your leg around, and to walk as if on a tightrope. By placing your front foot down directly in front of your back foot, you are able to avoid swaying to one side to balance yourself. This can be a difficult skill, but it is absolutely learnable. A great practice exercise for this is to string a rope between two stands at the height of some obvious point on your arm-side socket block, and then attempt to walk with the socket block tracing along the rope without going towards or away from it. Truly humbling to see how bad humans naturally are the first time we do that exercise!
Third, we see “surging” in speed. This can be a really difficult one to break, and requires a ton of leg strength! When you want to walk slowly, you need to transfer the weight from your back foot to your front foot, then pick up your back foot and place it in front to repeat the cycle. The movement pattern this creates is: Fast (transferring weight to the front foot), Stopped (picking up back foot and bringing it around), Fast (transferring weight onto new front foot). What you must do therefore is transfer weight more slowly onto your front foot, and continue that movement forward while you swing your leg around. This can only be done with bent knees, as with locked standing knees it is impossible to keep your body moving forward once you’ve transferred weight. This is a quite difficult skill but can be learned with time and strength training.
And finally, I think that an often overlooked part of elegant slow moves is your gimbal hand. When doing slow moves, any errant panning or tilting or horizon deviations become even more obvious, because motion of faster shots can hide a lot of issues. You need to be even more delicate, even more still with your hand, and do even more to “send” the rig into pans and tilts rather than trying to micromanage the frame or point it directly. That can make a big difference in a shot feeling truly omnipotent, or feeling “operated”.
As for backmounted vests, since I’m a user of one for about a decade now, I feel that I can chime in to say that a backmounted vest will not make your slow moves better, at least not directly. If anything, the fact that your socket block is now mounted much more solidly to your hips means that even more hip sway will be transferred to the socket block, and into the shot. However, the added stamina that I have from using a backmounted vest has allowed me to be more delicate at the end of shots, which is often where the slow moves are. In addition, the backmounted vest does allow you to push the rig away from your body without pain, which has allowed me to do small delicate moves without moving my feet, which eliminates a lot of these issues above.