Rigging Grip

What they do

Rigging grips work ahead of the unit. Days or weeks before a scene shoots they arrive at a stage or a location with speed rail, scaffold, chain, wire rope, clamps and truss, and build the structure that everything else will hang from: pipe grids over a set, greenbed and catwalk access, overhead frames for diffusion, blackout on a warehouse full of windows, a suspended platform for a camera, or the support for a wall that has to come away for a reverse. They tent locations against rain, box in windows so a night scene can be shot at noon, and rig points for the electrical rigging crew to hang units from. Every one of those decisions is a load calculation: what the structure can carry, what the ceiling can carry, what happens if a point fails, and where the secondary safety goes. They coordinate with the location manager over what may be drilled, clamped or touched at all, and with construction over what the set can take. Then they strike it all and restore the building. In IATSE this work sits with the grip department, Local 80; the equivalent electrical rigging crews are Local 728's rigging departments, led by chief rigging technicians.

What they decide

The calls that belong to this role and no other.

• How a structure is built and what it is rated to carry
• Where rigging points go, and where secondary safeties are placed
• Whether a ceiling, beam or wall can take a load at all
• How blackout and weather cover are constructed for a location
• The strike plan, and how the building is left

Principles of the craft

• Rig to the load, then rig again for failure: the primary support carries the weight and the secondary exists for the day the primary is wrong.
• The building is not yours: what can be drilled, clamped or loaded is a permission question before it is an engineering one, and it is agreed with the location manager in writing.
• Rigging buys shooting days: a location pre-rigged and blacked out lets the unit walk in and shoot, and that time saving is the department's actual product.
• Plan the strike while you build: a rig that went up in a day and takes three to remove has cost the production more than it saved.
• Access is part of the design: a grid nobody can safely reach to adjust a lamp on is an obstacle rather than a rig.

Common mistakes

• Assuming a ceiling or beam will take a load without checking who owns the building or the structure's rating
• Rigging without a secondary safety on suspended weight
• Blacking out a location so thoroughly that the crew has no ventilation or safe egress
• Building a grid that puts every point where the camera later needs to be
• The competent version: an impressively engineered rig that ignored how many hours the strike would take out of the schedule

How to learn it

Exercises and routes in, not a reading list.

• Rig a single overhead frame from two points with correct load spread and a secondary safety, then have someone experienced inspect and criticise it.
• Black out one window properly so that a midday interior reads as night on camera, and measure how much light still leaks at the edges.
• Take a small room and plan a pipe grid on paper: points, loads, access for adjustment, and where the camera and boom need clearance. Then build a scaled-down version.
• Time your own strike of anything you have rigged and compare it to your estimate. The gap is the lesson.