AERIAL FILMMAKING GE AR .
As the industry rushes to make up the backlog of two very slack years, aerial camera specialists find themselves under pressure to move fast – both literally and figuratively FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
WORDS. Phil Rhodes
M att Coyde of ACS points out that broadcast work recovered more quickly than drama. “The taps opened slowly from June 2020, after everything had stopped for months,” he begins. “Now the work is accelerating for everyone in the industry. We don’t just do aerial or stabilised gimbals – we supply a range of services, and everyone’s very busy.” The company’s inventory of stabilised mounts spreads the load by handling a range of camera and lens options – and, as Coyde says, other vehicles. “These were originally designed for helicopter use, but are also very interesting for natural history. They’ll take a system away into some of the most remote regions of the world for quite a while, and might be on a tracking car or boat. “You must tune the systems to the application,” Coyde points out. “You have to understand how they work, and have the mounts to provide some mechanical isolation from whatever you’re attaching them to. But they work for other applications, too. That’s important when we’re handling the range of work we have now. But for the future, they can function with new
cameras as they come on stream. We’ve got a really talented team of technicians and operators who support this. “In live production at the moment, there is a lot of interest around delivering positional data streams from the helicopter,” Coyde continues. “We might track the position of the aircraft in relation to a race, and that will be used to generate live graphics over the helicopter output.” The technical challenge can be not only mechanical, but also photographic, especially with the huge popularity of HDR. “We’re now working on bigger international projects in UHD and HDR... you’ve got to make sure – if you aren’t correcting it on the ground with a vision engineer via video link – that it’s delivered properly.” DRAMATIC PAYLOADS With broadcast now nipping at the heels of cinema in terms of sheer imaging capability, single-camera drama might feel the need to push the boat out a little, too. Emma Boswell of The Helicopter Girls describes the change: “Two and a half years ago we were mainly flying with our sub-25kg drones. The staple was the Alexa Mini,
49. MARCH 2022
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