 Welcome to The Crimson Engine. My name is Rubidium. Today we are looking at grip and how to get what you would normally get an entire grip truck into the trunk of a Honda Civic. Too often grip is the forgotten stepchild of filmmaking. Everyone gets very fixated on the camera and the lights, but doesn't realize that without a way to put those lights up or move that camera around, you don't really have a movie. You can't use lights unless you can rig them. You can't use the camera unless you can rig it and move it. The two big sort of tools of the grip world are the C-stand and the 4x4 frame. C-stand lets you put lights up. The 4x4 frame lets you diffuse it, cut it, change the color of it, and generally do all the modifications to light that you need to in order to shoot modern film. Now I have a Honda Civic. There is no 4-foot opening in a Honda Civic. I know this because I bought a couple of 4x4 frames a few months ago and went to the parking lot of film tools with them and could not get them in the car and I had to go back inside and ask if they could deliver them for me. But this posed a second problem of once I got them home and skinned them, how was I going to get them to wherever I was shooting? It's fine to use them in my studio, but how could I actually travel with them? The answer was I can't unless I have a gaffer who has a bigger car or a truck or a van. Essentially my 4x4 frames are now stuck here in Burbank. C-stands are another problem because it's always the C-stands that destroy something on set. It's always the best boy turning around with a C-stand that like knocks over the vase full of flowers or scratches the elevator or breaks the window and I have to say that C-stands once they're set up and being used are fine, but getting C-stands in and out of locations traditionally has been really problematic. So Matthew's Grip has come up with solutions for both of these issues. The first of these is the C-stand rolling kit bag which carries three disassembled C-stands with sort of rollerblade wheels at the bottom so that you no longer have to carry the weight of it and none of the parts that damage things are sticking out. It's all lined. It's all padded. It mitigates both the weight and the dangerousness, the destructiveness of the C-stand. It lets you get three C-stands where you want to get. They also have a shoulder stand with two C-stands if you have to carry it, but I got the the C-stand trio set and it is three C-stands with three gobos and gobo arms that lets you really break out a whole kind of, you know, many lighting set up out of one bag. It also has storage in the front for extra lighting stands or a small arm or more gels, whatever you want to do. It's a very convenient way to get your C-stands from where you are to where you want to be and then back again. The second thing I got was the Matthews Road Flags 2 kit. These are two four-by-four-foot frames that assemble and disassemble into sort of like a tent. It comes with a full black artificial silk one-stop and a two-stop net and a silver ultra bounce. And you basically build these things, fit them into the C-stand and you can get them anywhere you want them. There's also a junior version called the Road Rags kit. These guys are even more compact and they even more lightweight and it's something that you could just, if you're a one-person team, bring in with your kit to like a small office that allows you to bounce light or cut light or diffuse light in a really compact way. We messed around with them in the backyard and managed to get a pretty decent lighting set up with daylight and then it all went back into the bags and back into the trunk of my Civic. As a sometimes one-person filmmaker, sometimes 10-person team filmmaker, I'm really happy that film supply companies like Matthews are thinking not just of the bigger and the better and the high-end, which they are, but also thinking of, you know, small independent owner operators and one-man bands and make it easier for us to get the tools that we need to increase our production value, but also travel more efficiently. So Matthews make these. They are the Trio Plus Roller Kit with three C stands, the Road Rags 2 and the Road Flags 2. A really ingenious way to upgrade your grip equipment and still stay small, compact and travelable. Thanks very much for watching. Leave your questions in the comments. I will see you next time.