Need to move the camera, can't afford the cost. What do you do? Brad Yuen, of Los Angeles California, had the same challenge. He's presently working on a short Digital movie project entitled, "Blackwater", Produced by EnterMediArts, INC., or EMA for short.

The director and owner of the company is Carrie Ann Inaba. As it turns out, Carrie Ann likes to have lots of camera movement in her projects due to her vast professional choreography experience and really wanted to use a crane, dolly or jib for her project.

To buy a jib would have cost too much, and renting it for the amount of time she needed would have equaled the cost of buying one. Since Brad is her production technical adviser, he took on the challenge and created the "EMA Bee".

It's a jib arm made from wood 2x4's. It's max height is 8 feet, and it can handle a Canon XL-1s mounted on a Varizoom pan and tilt head. The counter weights, doughnut weights purchased at a sporting goods store, balance out the camera. As an added feature, there's a rotating turret, and wooded dolly to round out the system.

"The best thing is," Brad, says, "it was cheap to make, and now we have a jib of our own. " Brad does admit that if Carrie Ann decides to move on to an Arriflex 35mm camera, he'll probably have to go into stronger material than wood. Oh, what's the "Bee" stand for? The "Bee" came from a bee that landed on the jib while Brad was making it.