DIY Boom Pole by a DIY Noob

I know there are plenty of these guides out there. This one is based on the Frugal Filmmaker's awesome instructional video, which is a great guide if you live in America, a country brought up on Home Improvement and McGuyver, with a cavernous Home Depot on every street corner and a Dremel in every tool shed. Here in the UK, you're lucky if you even have a tool shed, and all the decent hardware stores have been swallowed by the bulging, consumerist ubiquity of Ikea. So here is how I made a super-cheap Boom Pole with the bare minimum of tools, talent and cash.

Here's what I used:

Parts

• A 2m telescopic painter's pole. I gave it a shake to make sure there was no rattling or loose connections. Cost - £5
• An M10 (10mm) x 50mm bolt... making sure it fits in the shock mount tightly. Cost - 75p
• An M10 (10mm) nut. Cost - 25p
• Super glue (optional). Cost - £3

Tools

• A drill, with a drill bit that is less than 10mm. My drill is a vintage hand-me-down from my grandfather made in 1985.
• A hacksaw

First thing's first, I made sure the bolt screws tightly into the boom connector on my shock mount. Because my shock mount uses a 3/8" connector and bolts in the UK are sold in millimetres, I had trouble finding a bolt that fitted exactly. I went to a small hardware store and went through a box of loose bolts until I found one the right size. Don't ask me how or why some bolts fit and some don't when they are supposedly all the same size!

Next, at the top of my pole there was a plastic thread for attaching a paint roller. Some DIY Boom Pole guides say this needs to be solid plastic or metal, but I had trouble finding a pole with a solid plastic thread. The one I used was hollow, but it worked okay for this purpose. I drilled a hole that was slightly too small for my bolt; it was to serve as a guide hole, which would get bigger when I worked the bolt in. I had a bit of trouble squeezing the bolt in, so I used a nail file to make the hole slightly bigger (please don't tell my girlfriend).

After that, I had to saw the head off the bolt with a hacksaw. I'd recommend using a workbench with a clamp to hold the bolt steady. I didn't have either so I screwed the bolt into the pole and sat on the end of the pole while sawing the bolt head off. Disclaimer: I seriously don't recommend this method!

Right, hard part's done. All that was left to do was to screw in the bolt so that it fitted tightly. I had some super glue on standby to fix the bolt to the plastic, but I didn't end up using it because the fit was pretty tight. I then screwed the nut onto the bolt. This will prevent the bolt from slipping into the hole. Finally, I screwed on my shock mount and now I'm good to go. I'm going to use the Rode SM3.

I'll let you know how I get on in future production blogs. In the meantime, if you have any of your own tips for building boom poles or any other pieces of kit, let us know in the comments section below.

Counting beans and coming soon...

There are some jobs in which employee performance is appraised by targets. At the end of the week, reports are run at a high level by a team of number crunchers who analyse the amount of beans (or whatever) you've produced, and then compare it to the average bean output of your team. Those hard working saints with above average productivity are lauded as gods amongst their colleagues and toasted as a success by middle management, while the unfortunate saps below the line are frowned upon and given must-try-harder talks.

Of course, I shouldn't have to point out that statistically about half the workforce is inherently going to be "below average", rendering this particular bean-counting exercise completely meaningless. But more annoyingly, the people who are meeting or exceeding targets are usually those who cherry-pick the easiest tasks leaving their unfortunate colleagues to pick up the hard ones that will take all day to complete.

Which is a very roundabout way of saying there are times when you can do a hell of a lot of work and end up having not much to show for it. For Cerebral Visions this might be one of those weeks. Due to hectic lives infringing on production schedules, and a current lack of green screen material we haven't been able to concentrate on a single project, but rather we've been multi-tasking on a bunch of concurrent operations, notably:

• An untitled assassin project, directed by Will (now in post production) [UPDATE: watch now]
• A comedy script tentatively entitled "The Two Torturers", penned by Paul
• The aforementioned short comedy involving an estate agent, directed by Snare (half way through production) [UPDATE: watch now]
• The Big Summer Project, still in the not-quite-written stage of pre-pre-production, which will be our most ambitious project to date

So you see, we are working hard... It just seems that ebbing and flowing is our kind of approach to release schedules ;)

Back in the Studio

So after about a month and a half of post on Pirates and Dating, we finally got back in the studio for some serious guerrilla film making. But what started as a plan to shoot another carefully scripted and rehearsed talking sketch quickly fell apart when we couldn't source a green screen integral to the scene. So what, a week and a half of planning, build-up and excitement down the plughole? Hell no! This is Cerebral Visions we're talking about, we don't let minor obstacles like Abject Failure get in the way of Absolute Success. We always have a plan... Don't we?

We needed a plan. So after brainstorming for two hours and ordering a KFC-themed injection of pure positivity, we hit the ground running with a new concept, a back-of-a-fag-packet script, an ambitious schedule and fading light. Without giving too much away, it involved an estate agent getting more than he bargained for on a house viewing. Everything was starting to look rosy, actors were primed, lights were rigged and production mixing was going to be an experiment in one person holding two sensitive pieces of equipment without actually touching them whilst simultaneously monitoring input and taking notes.

Then disaster struck again! This time in the familiar and demonic form of a real-life estate agent, insisting on showing prospective buyers around the house in which we were shooting. Life imitating art doesn't cut it; sinister forces were at work. However, we remained strong and after clearing the set of unwanted extras, we got on and filmed about half the scenes we needed. It was the first time we'd filmed anything with action and more than one scene, a proper trial by fire. But it was immense fun, and we came away with that sense of achievement you only get after a productive day's grinding. Shooting continues (and hopefully concludes) next week.