American Cinematographer - February 2018 - 80

NEW PRODUCTS & SERVICES
* SUBMISSION INFORMATION - Please email New Products/Services releases to newproducts@ascmag.com and include full contact information and product images.
Photos must be TIFF or JPEG files of at least 300dpi.

Up in the Air With HFS
By Phil Rhodes
"Generally, helicopters are designed to point forward," says
pilot Giles Dumper with some understatement. "Particularly if
you're going at any decent speed, you want to be flying them in
what we call 'trim,' or forward, as streamlined as possible. Flying
them sideways isn't really how they're designed to operate."
However, as a frequent pilot for London-based Helicopter Film
Services (HFS), Dumper is very used to flying helicopters sideways.
HFS founder Jeremy Braben credits the company's success to
having "very good people with me. The company wouldn't be
where it is today without the operators, the technicians and the
pilots we've worked with." Braben has preferred to specialize in
feature films and commercial work. "There are other companies
that are extremely good at news and live broadcast; that's not our
expertise. That explains why we're wall-to-wall movies and an equal
number of commercials. The equipment we have is out of reach of
[broadcast]."
AC caught up with Braben on the set - or, rather, the
airfield - of a shoot designed to showcase the company's considerable capabilities in both aerial and other vehicular camera mounts.
The facility at Bovingdon, northwest of London, went out of military
use in the late 1960s. It has since been used for an array of feature
productions, including recent releases such as Rogue One (AC Feb.
'16) and Fury (AC Dec. '14), and part of one runway remains in use
for general aviation. HFS, based at nearby Denham Aerodrome,
chose Bovingdon as an ideal place to showcase their vehicles with
ample room to operate both a helicopter and drone.
"The idea for that came through from one of our aerial cinematographers," Braben explains. "Jim Swanson said, 'Nobody really
knows what we've got. Let's see if we can conjure up a little
commercial that develops in an interesting way that actually shows
off all of our equipment and capabilities.'" Given the intended
80

February 2018

results, the shoot required a lot of cameras, including a Red Weapon
mounted to a Shotover U1 on a Black-Tek Tower mount that in turn
was rigged to HFS's Aston Martin Cygnet tracking vehicle. Another
Weapon was hard-mounted on the hero Aston Martin, with
another camera riding on HFS's Mitsubishi Evo tracking vehicle.
An Arri Alexa was used on a 500cc four-wheel-drive vehicle
- dubbed the "Quadzilla" - with an Angenieux Optimo 25250mm (T3.5) zoom, stabilized on a Nettmann Stab-C remote head.
An Alexa Mini was mounted on an Intuitive Aerial Aerigon drone,
flown by Alan Perrin, and equipped with an Arri/Zeiss Ultra Prime.
No less than six additional Alexa Minis were mounted on the
company's Typhon array. Created by HFS for visual-effects applications, the Typhon array rode a Shotover K1 gimbal platform on an
Airbus AS355 helicopter piloted by Dumper.
As a veteran pilot, Dumper is naturally cautious about the
safety aspects of putting all this equipment so close together. "I
don't think there have been many filming setups in which a drone
has flown close to a helicopter. I think we got about as close as we
could - certainly 30 meters or less. I don't think I'd have done it if
it hadn't been an HFS shoot. You've got to be quite clear who's
flying."

Practically, too, the drone has only a limited ability to resist
the huge amount of air that is moved around by a full-size helicopter
- a problem the crew solved with careful choreography. There is,
as might be expected, a certain degree of good-humored rivalry
between the drone and helicopter people, although both are keen
to emphasize how the two complement one another.
The camera technique required for helicopter photography is
split, Dumper says, "into two main camps. The first is typically a
fixed site - a building - [and] you're doing a fly backwards or a
reveal, a sweep around it. You have a bit of distance; you're not
quite so concerned about distance to the ground, but you're doing
a lot of sideways and backwards. You're maintaining frame to the
target building, and the vehicle is maneuvering in the correct

American Cinematographer

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - February 2018