What's a dolly, a crane, a jib — and why on earth would you need a Moy-to-Boss adapter? A plain-English introduction to the kit that moves the camera.
Published 27 April 2022 · 6 min read
Walk onto a film or high-end TV set for the first time and the grip department can look like a pile of black metal, wheels and mysterious adapters. In reality it's a carefully thought-out toolkit, and almost every piece exists to do one thing: move the camera smoothly, safely and exactly where the director of photography wants it. This guide breaks down the core equipment in plain English, so whether you're a producer costing a shoot or a trainee finding your feet, you'll know your dolly from your jib.
The dolly is the workhorse of the grip department. It's a wheeled platform that carries the camera — and often the operator and focus puller too — and lets you glide the camera through a shot rather than locking it off on sticks. A good dolly move feels invisible: the audience never notices the camera travelling, they just feel drawn into the scene.
Most professional dollies can also "jib" the camera vertically up and down on a hydraulic arm, so a single move can rise, fall and travel all at once. Dollies run either on their own rubber wheels for smooth studio floors, or on track when the floor is rough or the move needs to be perfectly repeatable. At Kinetik we're proud users of Chapman dollies — the industry gold standard — alongside Panther and central-column bases for tighter builds.
Track is what turns a bumpy floor into a glass-smooth move. Precision aluminium track is levelled with wedges and dead-flat spirit levels, then the dolly rolls along it so the same move can be repeated take after take. For smaller, more intimate moves — a slow push across a table, a reveal past a foreground object — a slider does the same job in miniature: a short rail, typically two to four feet, that the camera glides along.
When the shot needs to leave the ground, you reach for a crane or a jib. A jib arm is a counter-balanced lever: the camera sits on one end, counterweights on the other, and the grip sweeps the camera up, down and around. It's perfect for adding height and a sense of scale without the footprint of a full crane.
A crane takes that idea much further, extending many metres to lift the camera over crowds, sets and vehicles. Larger cranes carry the camera on a remote head — a motorised head the operator controls from the ground — so no one has to ride the arm. Our GFM GF-8 X-Ten reaches over ten metres, which is the kind of reach that turns a good establishing shot into a memorable one.
Whatever the camera sits on, it needs a head — the part that actually pans and tilts. Fluid heads like the Ronford Baker Fluid 7 use sealed fluid units to give beautifully damped, controllable movement. Between the head and the dolly or crane you'll often find a leveller (a three-way or four-way) that lets the grip get the head perfectly flat even when the base isn't.
This is where newcomers glaze over, so let's demystify it. Grip equipment uses a handful of standard mounting interfaces, and adapters simply let one talk to another.
The Mitchell — often called a Moy in the UK — is a flat base with a keyway that heads, offsets and levellers bolt onto. It's one of the most common fittings in the UK and US, rock-solid for heavy camera packages, and usually paired with a three-way or four-way leveller to get things flat.
Popular across parts of Europe, a bowl fitting lets you loosen one clamp and level the head by eye without a separate leveller — quick and convenient, though arguably less secure for the heaviest builds.
The Boss, or Euro, fitting is the central mount on many European central-column dollies and on the risers and "pots" that raise camera height. To put a Mitchell or bowl head on a Euro mount you need an adapter — and this is where the fun names come in. A "World Cup" adapter (so-called because it looks like the football trophy) converts a Euro mount to a bowl, while a Moy-to-Boss adapter marries a Mitchell head to a Euro base. Once you've seen them on set, the jargon stops being intimidating and starts being useful shorthand.
A typical build might be: track on the floor, a Chapman dolly on the track, a leveller on the dolly's Mitchell mount, a fluid head on the leveller, and the camera on top — with the grip driving the dolly and jibbing the arm while the operator pans and tilts. Swap the dolly for a crane and a remote head and you've got the same logic, just bigger. Every adapter in between exists to connect two standards that would otherwise refuse to shake hands.
That's the foundation. In Part 2 we'll get into rigging, car mounts, vibration isolators and the specialist kit that lets the camera go places it really shouldn't be able to. In the meantime, if you're planning a shoot and want to talk through what you'll actually need, that's exactly what we're here for.