great scene, terrible movie 😛
I don't know... I was pretty entertained watching it. Certainly no Citizen Kane, but the cinematography is nice and the bad puns made me laugh involontarily at times.
🙂 Michael Bay will never win an Oscar, but he knows how to handle a camera, for example in this shot.
Usually for this kind of shot, you would use a dolly system with tracks. They are quite expensive though, and even the DIY ones will take up a lot of space in your garage. So if you hardly ever need them, I don't think it's a good idea.
Walking around however is not an option in my opinion. While the viewer may forgive imperfections in the smoothness of the horizontal movement, vertical movement from your steps will just look very wrong and as if you were walking around the person.
😉
I would probably try to get something with wheels and tracks to put your camera on or something with wheels to put yourself and your camera on. No budget dolly shots are often times done with a wheelchair. You can borrow these or even buy them pretty cheap, sit in one and have a friend push it along a pre-drawn circle line.
You could also try mounting a rope to the "dolly" (i.e. wheelchair, skateboard, or anything with wheels) and to the floor where your actor stands. Keeping tension on the rope will make sure that you always have the same distance from your actor (for a shallower DOF possibility).
There are also cheap tripod dollys (search on Amazon) without tracks. While those are not perfect, you could get away with it by using the rope trick and a really smooth ground.
