05/28/2026
How do you bounce light when you can’t use stands?
We just wrapped a commercial where we wanted a large bounce to play, but we were shooting in a creek. Dancing a 12x20 around on stands would have been time-consuming and difficult. So instead, we put it on a condor.
When you mount a frame to a condor, you usually do it flat as a diffusion or a bounce, a flyswatter. You have a bit of adjustability from the basket controls. But if you need it to do anything drastically different, you need to come down with the whole rig and change it up.
For this bounce, I wanted it to live vertically to catch the angle of the sun. Problem was, I needed it to be able to articulate throughout the day to optimize for the right sun angle. When the bucket is twisted 90 degrees, you don’t quite get the range of articulation I’d need for this rig. So we built that adjustability into the rig itself.
This allowed us to precisely position the bounce and track with the sun’s movement throughout the day.
Three things to flag if you want to copy this:
1. Add floor flanges on either side of the loose crosses and the bottom of the verticals for added safety.
2. Definitely triangulate the verticals that hang down and attach to the frame. If you don’t, they’ll likely bend.
3. Use a steel pipe across the frame.** Undersize the width of the frame by 1’ or 2’ so the 20’ steel pipe reaches the sides.
A nice upgrade would have been being able to control it from the ground. But I’ll leave that for the next time we do this.
Want the full rig breakdown with more photos? Head to legacygrip.com.
