FEATURE | AER I AL SPEC I AL
We had to fly the helicopter at about five feet off the ground for a shot, passing very close to the stunt crew we were filming
last year within their parent company called Unmanned Flight Services; and an academy is included in that as well. “We’ve got a pool of talented people and we’re using our existing camera technician engineers for drawings and manufacturing. A lot of the parts are commercially available, we’re not building new motors so nothing is too bespoke. “Titan carries a ballistic recovery feature; interestingly most of the other aircraft out there were not designed for the extra weight of a parachute, although the Shotover U1 can have a parachute and there are a few others around that do. Ours can be tested and repacked; we were keen to have this triple redundancy, we’re just trying to minimise the risk. “Battery management is of course a big thing and we’ve had to work around existing technology. That technology hasn’t really allowed us more power along with less weight yet. But as new chemistries come on and new technology we’ll obviously adopt that and it will help, I hope, to reduce the weight. “We’re also looking at a lot of other industries to market our drone; there are a lot of other applications and some of them involve small and very lightweight aircraft.” VIRTUAL WORLD HFS, along with other aerial services, is now more commonly asked to capture for the virtual world through airborne Lidar and photogrammetry to name a couple. HFS’ involvement with VFX has
grown over the last year as requested by their customers. “We’ve seen how these productions have deployed different technologies on the ground,” says Jeremy, “and we wondered if there was some way of integrating that in the air. We’ve spoken to quite a few different VFX supervisors and houses and asked if this could be of use to them. That’s where the Lidar use came about; we’ve used it on helicopters quite a bit and we’ve integrated Lidar and a large format camera in a stabilised system to capture off both elements at the same time, so you’re minimising the number of runs. Hopefully there is an economic benefit to using a single pass system as opposed to doing multiple passes.” GETTING THE SHOTS John Marzano is a hugely experienced aerial cinematographer with an impressive list of credits including the Downton Abbey movie, Artemis Fowl , Black Panther , Jason Bourne
IMAGES The move to smaller gimbals is an attempt to replicate the ease of drones
56 DEF I N I T ION | MAY 20 1 9
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