American Cinematographer - September 2016 - 24

Top, from left: Camera assistant Ben Crossley gets the collapsible crane into place while
cinematographer Simon Niblett and director Otto Bell observe. Bottom: An eagle supervises as
Crossley checks the camera.

during the warm months and settling into
small villages during the brutal winters. Only
men hunt. Training a girl to be an eagle
hunter flouted age-old rules.
The elusive goddesses of documentary seemed to be smiling, though. Bell
recalls the moment during that first meeting
when Agalai said, "My daughter and I are
going to steal an eaglet from its nest in the
morning. Is that the kind of thing you would
like to film?" The director's joy was matched
only by his trepidation; the small crew had
not come prepared to shoot a scene of such
magnitude. They had only Raymond's
Canon EOS C300 Mark I, Svidensky's Canon
EOS-1D Mark IV and Bell's GoPro Hero4
Black, with Bell's older Zoom H4n digital
recorder for recording sound. But there was
no chance of reshooting this crucial event.
24

September 2016

Capturing an eaglet is the first of
three main trials undertaken to become a
master eagle hunter, and it has to be done
during the brief period when the bird has
learned to fly but is still living in the nest, fed
and protected by a fierce mother. Once an
eaglet is taken, only one hunter works with
it for seven years before releasing it back
into the wild.
For Aisholpan and Agalai, stealing
the eaglet was the culmination of months
of preparation. He, a two-time winner of
the annual Golden Eagle Festival in Ölgii,
had taught her to hold and feed his bird,
how to gently remove its hood, how to call
it to her. Bell and Svidensky followed Aisholpan and her father up a mountain, then
scaled down a steep cliff to a ledge where
Agalai lowered his daughter - who wore
American Cinematographer

the GoPro on her sweater for POV shots -
by rope down to the huge nest. Meanwhile,
Raymond was situated below to establish
the vast background and the cliff's height.
In order to shoot up at Aisholpan and
be close enough to record sound, Svidensky
and Bell were also lowered to a precarious
ledge, below and to the left of the nest. Bell
recalls, "Asher didn't have a tripod, so I was
just trying to get him to hold [the camera]
steady. I was holding the Zoom [recorder],
talking in Asher's ear, and meanwhile we
had the mother eagle circling overhead." It
took Aisholpan more than one try to
capture the fledgling in a bag, but she
succeeded. Her triumphant smile as she
holds her eaglet became the climax of the
film's first act.
Once Niblett's prior commitment
wrapped, he was able to join the production
as director of photography following this
first sequence. He made four trips to
Mongolia, and he used three of his own
cameras; a Red Epic Mysterium-X was the
main camera, a Blackmagic Production
Camera 4K served as the second camera
during the Golden Eagle Festival, and a
Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera was
used for drone shots. "The Epic affords high
frame rates and can be stripped down to
use on the crane and DJI Ronin gimbal, [the
latter of] which we used both on the crane
as a remote head and handheld out of a
truck for some horse-riding tracking shots,"
Niblett explains. "The Pocket camera was
the perfect drone camera due to its small
size and raw capabilities. We used a 12mm
[Olympus Micro Four Thirds] lens exclusively
with the Pocket camera." The cinematographer adds that the lens had to be dismantled "at least twice to clear the dust that
gathered from takeoffs on the steppe."
Even with the need to move between
grand landscapes and intimate portraits,
Niblett used only a few lenses with the Epic
and Blackmagic Production Camera: a PLmounted Tokina 11-16mm (T2.8) zoom
rehoused by Duclos Lenses, Red 18-50mm
and 50-150mm zooms (both T3), Canon Lseries 200mm and 300mm primes, and a
Canon 150-600mm T5.6 zoom. All of the
Canon lenses were Optex-modified for PL
mounts. "The Canon 150-600mm was a
$25,000 lens when new - circa 1985
- and is super sharp," Niblett says. "I use a

American Cinematographer - September 2016

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