A key grip heads the grip department, which is responsible for two things: everything that shapes, blocks or bounces light without producing it, and everything that physically supports or moves the camera. Flags, nets, diffusion frames, bounce boards, dollies, cranes, car rigs and specialist mounts all belong to grip.
The department works alongside the electrical department on lighting, and alongside the camera department on movement, reporting to the DP.
The two halves of the job
Shaping light. A light source on its own is a blunt instrument. What makes it look like a window, a streetlamp, or the sun through a doorway is what happens between the source and the subject.
Grip owns that space. Flags cut light off a wall. Nets reduce intensity without changing quality. Diffusion frames soften. Bounce boards redirect. Solids block entirely. Silks and overheads control daylight on exteriors, which is often the largest grip operation on a film: rigging a twenty foot frame of diffusion over a location to make midday sun usable.
Supporting the camera. Anything the camera sits on that is not a tripod is grip: dollies, track, sliders, jibs, cranes, remote heads, car mounts, hostess trays, and every improvised rig involving clamps and a scaffold pole.
The two halves are connected by craft rather than subject: both are about building physical structures fast, safely, and precisely.
The rule that sorts grip from electric
The one people learn on their first day: if it plugs in, it is electric. If it does not, it is grip.
A light is electrical. The stand it is on is grip on some units and electrical on others, by local convention. The flag cutting that light is grip. The frame of diffusion in front of it is grip. The cable running to it is electrical.
The practical consequence for anyone directing or producing: ask grip for anything about shaping the image and ask electrical for anything about making light.
Not a runner, not a junior, and not necessarily a boy. The best boy is the second in command of a department, and there are two of them on a normal crew: the best boy grip and the best boy electric. It is a senior position, and the work is largely departmental management: running the crew, ordering and returning equipment, managing the truck, handling timesheets and paperwork, and coordinating with the production office. It exists so that the key grip and the gaffer can stay on the floor solving problems rather than doing logistics. The name is generally thought to come from the practice of asking another department to lend you their best available hand, and it has survived for the same reason most set terminology has: everyone already knows it.
The department
Key grip. Head of department. Works directly with the DP and the gaffer, plans the rigging, directs the crew.
Best boy grip. Second in command, as above.
Dolly grip. A specialist and genuinely a performer. During a moving shot, the dolly grip pushes the dolly along a precise path at a precise speed, hitting marks in coordination with the operator's pan and the focus puller's pull. A complicated move is a three-person choreography and the dolly grip is the one providing the motion. Good ones are sought after by name.
Grips. The crew, building and rigging.
Rigging grips. On larger productions, a separate team pre-rigging locations before the shooting unit arrives.
On the day
For each setup, the key grip:
- Hears the DP's and gaffer's intent, usually at the same time.
- Decides what shaping is needed and where it goes.
- Directs the crew to build it.
- Sets up whatever camera support the shot requires, and rehearses moves with the operator and dolly grip.
- Solves whatever physical problem arises: a camera that has to go somewhere there is nothing to stand on, a light that must appear to hang in mid-air, a mirror that reflects the crew.
That last category is most of the job. Grip is the department people go to when something needs to be held in a position that nothing was designed to hold it in, and the answer usually involves a combination of clamps, stands and a piece of timber.
Safety
Grip carries substantial physical risk: working at height, heavy rigging over people's heads, cranes, camera cars, and large frames that behave like sails in wind.
Exterior overhead rigs in wind are a recurring serious hazard, and a key grip who says a frame is coming down because the wind has picked up is making a safety call, not being difficult.
Anything involving a camera on a moving vehicle is a grip operation with its own protocols, and it is one of the areas where cutting corners has killed people.
What makes a good one
Physical problem solving. The ability to look at an impossible request and produce a rig in fifteen minutes.
Speed. Grip is often the department the whole set is waiting on, because the shaping has to happen before the image is right.
Knowing the inventory. What is on the truck, what each piece can carry, and what can substitute for what.
Safety judgment that does not bend. Under time pressure, from senior people, repeatedly.
Crew leadership. Directing physical work quickly and clearly.
On a small film
On a short there is often no grip department at all, and the functions get absorbed by whoever is nearest. That is workable, and two things are worth knowing.
Shaping matters more than adding. Most beginners try to improve an image by adding another light. Frequently the better move is to take light away from part of the frame. A single flag, or a piece of black cloth on a stand, will do more for an image than a fourth lamp. This is the cheapest lesson in cinematography and grip is where it lives.
Improvised rigging is where people get hurt. A camera clamped to a car with hardware from a DIY shop is genuinely dangerous, to the crew and to the public. If you cannot rig it properly, shoot it another way. There is always another way, and no shot on a short film is worth an injury.
A basic small-film grip kit is a couple of stands, a few clamps, some black cloth, a bounce board, and a roll of gaffer tape, and it will transform what a two-light setup can do.
Next
Out of the lighting floor and into the world the camera is pointed at. Next: the department that builds and dresses everything you see.
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