Jib Arm

What this is about

Where a dolly travels along the floor, a jib works around a pivot, and that difference decides which one a shot needs. The arm lifts the camera from knee height to well above the crew, floats over a table or a wall, and comes back down onto a face — a vertical vocabulary that track cannot reach. Setup is its own discipline: the base must be solid and levelled, counterweights have to balance the head and camera exactly, and a remote head is needed once the camera goes higher than an arm can reach. Crews also plan headroom, since ceilings and cables limit the swing.

A term only helps when everyone on set means the same thing by it — so what follows is how it is used, not a dictionary definition.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• A jib pivots around a fixed point; a dolly translates through space. The two moves look different and are not interchangeable.
• Counterweights must match camera and head exactly, and rebalancing after a lens change costs real minutes.
• Once the camera rises out of reach, a remote head and its own operator become part of the package.

With TillyGen

TillyGen groups jib shots together in the schedule, so the arm is built once a day rather than assembled and struck between setups.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.