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LENSES FOR AERIAL CINEMATOGRAPHY SHOOT STORY
elicopter Film Services (HFS) has been producing the highest end aerial cinematography for years and has seamlessly bridged the arrival of drones by incorporating them neatly in to its offering. The company also embraces new ways of capture with its fleet of helicopters and heavy lift drones by wringing the most out of their engineering ability. SHOOTING PLATES An example of this is HFS’s Typhon 6 Camera Array, which shows off their engineering achievement in the best light. This array incorporates six ARRI ALEXA Mini cameras mounted in a Shotover K1 stabilised system, in order to shoot plates that can then be stitched together in post-production. The Array is designed to enable both aerial and ground-based filming of sequences when a particularly wide field of vision is required. Oliver Ward, chief technical officer at HFS, explains: “We created the Typhon to meet ever greater need for a stabilised array, primarily based around the ARRI ALEXA camera.” It’s already seen use on Paddington 2 , whose unit production manager, TimWellspring explains: “We had a first use, and it worked beautifully.” The Typhon 6 was used extensively on a tracking vehicle with a hydroscope crane on Paddington 2 for the train chase sequences. Glen Pratt at Framestore, visual effects supervisor explains: “The Typhon Array gives us a huge field of view. This provides a better sense of the environment you’re moving through and means that, within the frame, there are a lot of points of interest that can act as a background for areas you’ve shot before. The Typhon can also be used for a photogrammetry aspect, so you can run at a slower frame rate with a hard shutter to build this large field of view, creating a successful piece of tracking geometry. “Only a super-stable system can allow the use of this frame rate/ shutter. Having this Array also brings benefits when creating any CG fields on top of what we’ve already shot,” continues Glen. “When creating a wholly graphic environment, it gives a very thorough starting point, meaning we can reduce the number of CG builds so there’s less work required in post. That means less pressure on budgets and schedules, and more time to finesse the work.”
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AUGUST 2018 DEFINITION
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