FEATURE | AER I AL SPEC I AL
NEW GIMBAL, NEW MARKET SHOTOVER’S NEW GIMBAL IS ITS MOVE TO FILL THE GAP BETWEEN DRONES AND FULL-SIZED HELICOPTER SHOOTING
With the B1 gimbal you’re looking at maybe cinema mirrorless cameras like the Sony A7s
or approvals for the drone. Maybe their customers can’t afford a full-size helicopter with that hourly rate. “Smaller TV stations maybe in up- and-coming countries will look at the B1, also the branded content market and mirrorless cameras shooting Raw is just right for them. You’re talking about web content, TV and commercials too. This gives them the advantage of a zoom lens which is fully stable, which they won’t get on a drone. “If you think you couldn’t afford aerials then with the B1 the chances are you can. If you look at our biggest gimbal, the K1, you’re saving about half a million dollars with the B1. We’re also offering a five-year warranty which gets you your maintenance parts and labour over that time. It really lowers the barrier to entry.”
The new Shotover B1 gimbal is the smallest one Shotover has ever made and that has some advantages and disadvantages. Firstly, you can’t fly the cameras you usually do; but that does open another market as Brad Hurndell, CEO of Shotover explains. “With the B1 you’re looking at maybe cinema mirrorless cameras like the Sony A7s with maybe a 20- 120x lens. The B1 is still six-axis like the bigger models, so it gives you all that functionality. “We’re looking at a whole new market segment with the B1, a wider market. Customers for it would be looking at filling a gap between the full-sized helicopters and the drone market. It’s guys who want to shoot aerials but don’t want to muck around with transportation issues or crew
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So we wanted to create something that could do all of that.” And Jeremy quickly realised that there was nothing in the market that could carry that payload for the time he required it to. “Pre-built, there was nothing. There are different aircraft around that maybe could help but they are not in the film world and much bigger. We needed a gimbal, too, one that we wanted and that could take those particular cameras. Arri’s SRH-3 gimbal, for example, was developed by them with another German engineering company; we’ve integrated that into the Titan and we know that it can take the Alexa 65 camera and all the Arri controls. It’s a nice seamless way of using those products. “The other one we have is a bigger gimbal that can take the film cameras because it’s a slightly different layout of gimbal. So we’ve designed an aircraft that can lift both of these gimbals for all of these applications that we see a need for.” IN-HOUSE DESIGN HFS’ Titan drone was completely designed and constructed in its own engineering department. “The development has been going on for around a year and we showed the prototype at the BSC earlier this year,” says Jeremy. “We’re building the production model at the moment. I doubt we’ll build it for anyone else but we’re building more than one for ourselves. I might entertain selling them into different markets but perhaps not in this one.” HFS created a new company
54 DEF I N I T ION | MAY 20 1 9
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