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In this video about the filming of The Battle of Winterfell, starting at 4:04 you can see 2 people follow around the cameraman as he is filming.

What are they doing? They seem superfluous and considering that everything is already rather hectic I doubt they would want to have extra bodies floating around doing nothing

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Clearly they're there to offer the cameraman protection. You can see they're guarding him from other actors. As you said, it's a hectic scene, and the cameraman can only look through his viewfinder to see what's directly in front of him in order to catch the proper shot. Those guys make sure he stays safe and isn't bumped into otherwise the camera will move and the shot will be lost.

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    +1 It's possible that losing the shot was a secondary concern to a risk of losing the camera if a strong enough collision occured. That's an interesting note on the unscripted and deliberately chaotic nature of the shoot. Jul 7, 2016 at 19:33
  • It's worth pointing out that it also allows the talent/stunts team to not pay attention to the camera, which would be awful as their attention would be divided and it would likely be apparent on screen.
    – Catija
    Jul 7, 2016 at 19:42
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    It's probably also worth pointing out that the same is quite likely on an ordinary 'street' scene with simple waking passers-by. The steady-cam operator has to be looking at the scene, so he has someone to guide him especially if he needs to be walking backwards - they serve a secondary purpose of nudging other people out of the way - as @Catjia says, no-one is looking at where the camera is, so it's remarkably easy to miss when it's right next to you.
    – Tetsujin
    Jul 8, 2016 at 8:06

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