What it is

The Cameraman is a horror mod about being watched. A three-person film crew is somewhere in your world: a camera operator, a boom-mic operator, and a director with a clapperboard. They follow you. They hide when you turn around, and freeze mid-step when you catch one in the open, holding perfectly still until you look away. Nothing announces them. You just start noticing the same silhouette at the edge of things.

Mostly you forget they are there. You are mining, or fencing a field, and at the edge of your screen someone crouches behind a fence post that hides roughly none of them. Turn your head and the whole crew locks up like children caught out of bed. Then, a second later, they scramble for better cover, crouching as they go. The boom operator is the one who gets you: they work four to seven blocks out, arms up, and when you spin around the windshield is right there. Underground it gets worse, because they get lanterns out and you can see exactly how close they have been standing.

👥 Playing with friends

The crew work off whoever is nearest, so they change subject as people walk past

⚠️ Before you install

The crew never despawn and there is no dismiss command; killing them is currently the only way to stop the shoot.
Sprint away and they will be left behind; there is no catch-up teleport yet.
They have no sounds yet, so a crew you cannot see gives you nothing to hear.

Your first 5 minutes

New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.

Open the Tools & Utilities creative tab and take a Clapperboard.
Right-click it. Three crew arrive behind you and spread out.
Walk somewhere ordinary. The camera operator holds 6 to 12 blocks and raises the camera whenever they can see you.
Turn and stare straight at one. They freeze, then break for cover.
Go underground. Lanterns come out in the offhand.
Stand still a while and the director sets up a chair and sits in it.

How it works

Hiring the crew

The Clapperboard is the only way to call a unit in. Right-click and a camera operator, boom operator and director spawn behind you at the distance each one likes to work from. Try it again while crew are within 48 blocks and you get "The crew are already rolling." Every spawn goes through a placement search that looks for two non-suffocating blocks over a solid face, because an early version dropped people inside hillsides.

Tip: /summon cameraman:camera_operator (or boom_operator, director) gives you one in isolation.

They freeze when you look

The server checks each crew member against your look direction: within a 30-degree cone, within 32 blocks, and with a clear line of sight. A wall between you counts as not looking, which is what makes hiding work at all. Being spotted stops them dead for about 15 ticks (no movement, no head tracking), then they break for cover, and they cannot be frozen again for another 100 ticks.

Tip: The freeze outranks everything except not drowning, so a caught crew member really does stop mid-stride.

Cover selection is deliberately bad

To decide whether they are hidden, a crew member checks one single block, one step toward you, at head height. There is no width check and no check that the cover is opaque or bigger than a person. That is why they end up behind saplings, fence posts, sugar cane and glass. The source comments say so out loud so nobody later fixes it.

Tip: A spotted crew member will accept 8 blocks of extra range to get behind something, and crouches while scurrying.

Distance bands and the filming pose

Each job has a band it tries to hold: camera operator 6 to 12 blocks, boom operator 4 to 7, director 8 to 16. When a crew member can actually see you, a synced flag lifts their arms into a role-specific pose (camera at eye level, boom overhead angled forward, director never) and the camera's tally light switches to its lit model. The boom operator also steps a quarter-turn around you whenever they drift within about 40 degrees of the camera's line.

The director sits down

Once the director has been settled for five seconds with you inside a 24-block radius, he spawns a folding chair and rides it. The chair discards itself two seconds after it is vacated, so a director you chase off leaves no furniture behind.

Interns

When a crew member dies, an intern is dispatched to cover the job. They arrive about 20 blocks away so you watch them jog in, and they stand roughly two blocks closer than the person they replaced, but only on camera duty, and never inside two blocks. Interns wear numbered badges counted by a per-world tally that only ever goes up, so the number is a running score of how badly the shoot has gone.

Tip: Kill an intern and another intern turns up. The original three are deliberately unnamed.

Rattled

Hit a crew member and they stop filming for four seconds and retreat to the back of their band. Colleagues within 16 blocks catch half of it; a crew watches each other. They can be killed, and they drop nothing.

Lanterns and blinking

Below light level 8 a lantern appears in the crew's offhand and goes away again in daylight. It is a prop: vanilla mobs cannot emit light, so it lights nothing. They also blink, via a whole-texture swap with the eyes painted shut, staggered by entity id so the crew never blink in unison.

Items & blocks

Camera Operator

The anchor of the shot: backwards snapback cap, big over-ear headphones, a utility vest with too many pockets, cargo shorts, exactly one knee pad, and a laminated pass on a lanyard. Holds 6 to 12 blocks and frames you side-on.

Where: Arrives when you right-click the Clapperboard.

Boom Operator

Sunburnt across the nose and the strip of forehead the headphones miss, wearing a battery belt of coloured cells. Works 4 to 7 blocks out with the pole angled forward so the windshield leads.

Where: Arrives with the crew.

Director

Beret worn at an angle, sunglasses pushed up onto the forehead and never actually worn, quilted coat, scarf indoors, and a viewfinder on a string worn like a medal nobody gave him. Watches. Gestures. Contributes nothing.

Where: Arrives with the crew, then finds somewhere to sit.

Intern

Beanie pulled slightly too low, a hi-vis tabard two sizes too big over their own clothes, lanyard worn with pride. Covers any job, badly, and wears the number of the intern they are.

Where: Dispatched automatically whenever a crew member dies.

Clapperboard

Hires a unit. Also the director's permanent prop. He never raises it, because a clapperboard is not a tool.

Where: Tools & Utilities creative tab. There is no recipe yet.

Camera

A 3D held model with a lens barrel, a battery pack and a tally light that lights up while its holder can see you.

Where: Carried by the camera operator; also in the creative tab.

Boom Mic

A pole with a fuzzy windshield, gripped in the middle so the operator reads as holding it two-handed.

Where: Carried by the boom operator; also in the creative tab.

Director's Chair

A folding canvas chair the director brings with him. It is a rideable entity drawn from its own item model, and it deletes itself two seconds after he stands up.

Where: The director spawns it himself once he has settled.

Texture gallery

Every texture this mod ships, at its real in-game size, scaled up so you can see each pixel. Most are 16×16, the same size as a vanilla dirt block.

boom operator blink texture — boom operator blink

cameraman blink texture — cameraman blink

Lore

Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.

Nobody says what this is for

There is no network, no commission and no release date. A clapperboard calls a unit, the unit turns up, and the only thing the production ever says to you is that it is already rolling. Whatever the footage is for, you are not in the loop on it.

The intern number

Interns are numbered per world, and the counter only ever rises. Intern #7 means six people held that job before them. The original three crew are never given names or numbers, which tells you roughly how the production values everyone else.

Jokes & trivia

Bits you might miss

The cover test looks at exactly one block. A sapling passes. So does glass.
The director brings his own chair, sits in it, and it vanishes two seconds after he gets up.
Interns wear numbered badges, and the number never goes down.
The lantern the crew carry underground emits no light at all. It is a prop.
Try to hire a second unit and the game tells you: "The crew are already rolling."
The boom operator quietly sidesteps a quarter-turn around you whenever they wander into the camera's shot.
They blink out of sync on purpose, because a crew blinking in unison read as far creepier than a crew that never blinked.

From the workshop

The camera pointed the wrong way for two playtests. The correct rotation (180 degrees) was solved from those two observations rather than guessed at a third time.
The spotting cone started at 120 degrees, wider than the screen, so crew reacted to players who were not looking anywhere near them. It is 30 now.
Early interns spawned inside the corpse of the person they replaced, because the placement search only looked four blocks up and down.
The seated pose is free: vanilla already bends a riding mob's legs, so the chair is a rideable entity and the director just sits on it.
Every crew skin and gear model is generated by two Python scripts that write straight into the mod's asset folder, so the art can be re-rolled without touching the game code.

FAQ

Do I need it on the server as well as my game?

Yes. It adds new people to the world, and everyone needs the mod to see them.

Are they dangerous?

No. They never attack, they drop nothing, and hitting one just rattles them. Killing one summons an intern to cover the job.

How do I get them to show up?

Take a Clapperboard from the Tools & Utilities creative tab and right-click it. They do not spawn on their own yet.

Can I make them leave?

Not yet. There is no dismissal, and they never despawn. The only way to end a shoot is to kill the crew.

Can I see through the camera?

Not yet. Cutting to the camera operator's view, and the SIGNAL LOST card when they die, are planned but not built.

Crafting recipes

Crafting recipe for Clapperboard — Clapperboard

Get it

Status: The jar compiles and the author has tested it himself, but it has not had a real playtest yet.

Install NeoForge for Minecraft 1.21.1. The install guide walks through this assuming no prior knowledge.
Drop the mod's .jar file into your mods folder.
Everyone on the server needs it.
Launch the game with that loader's profile selected.

📦 Where is the file?

This wiki documents the mods; it does not host them. Builds live in the project's own repository under mc-the-cameraman/build/libs/.

Crew skins and gear models generated by the Python scripts in art/.

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