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By Gerry Mackie
A couple of weeks back Nigel Bluck from The Sweet Shop, Jon Baxter from Perceptual Engineering and Murray Milne camera operator from Tony Monk Films were involved with an interesting and challenging project for Tokyo advertising agency Dentsu, their client Toyota and the world release of a new Toyota range. The Toyota IMV project, a two-country aerial shoot, (Australia and New Zealand) used a variety of locations chosen to mimic the Arabian desert, African savannah, tropics of Asia, coastal, mountains and Siberia as well as urban and suburban aerial scenes. The brief sought a camera system that could look straight down and track "dummy" cars through the various scenes and provide continuity of scale at different altitudes, relative to surroundings. Some scenes were to be shot at 200 ft and others such as over Sydney at 1500 ft. Nigel Bluck, DOP on the shoot decided to use Tony Monk Film’s Cinegyro, aerial camera system with Murray Milne, an accomplished DOP in his own right, at the gyro’s controls. At the time of writing Bluck had not seen the finished result, he did say that he was a HD skeptic and still was. He also said " As a piece of motion control equipment it (the Cinegyro) was phenomenal." 
Nigel Bluck and Murray Milne with Cinegyro and helicopter. Milne expanded, "The system provided the ability to compensate for wind or helicopter movement by adjusting for roll or yaw. By comparison a fixed mount system would not have the ability to maintain the road centre-screen unless the helicopter flew absolutely straight and keeping the scale correct at the varied altitudes took up to 250mm camera zoom."  |  | | C/u of aerial of car on road and spiral junction. | Same shot, wide at actual helicopter height | Perceptual Engineering is a Ponsonby based, post production hot-shop with recent projects for brands such as Global Plus, WOOSH, Hyundai, Mercury Energy and Ingham Chicken (the light sabre TVC). Jon Baxter from Perceptual felt there were production advantages in post with the HD format. "Working with HD in Flame 8 allowed us to use the full resolution 1920 x 1080 pixel images along with standard Pal x 576 images interchangeably in the same project. For shots that required further stabilisation or zooming-in on a subject, we were able to maintain a full crisp final image. Also keying and roto work was vastly improved working at the higher resolution. It was slower though."  |  | | Pilot Lindsay Snell in the filming chopperflying south from Australia’s Gold Coast | Cinegyro, helicopter and Kea (foreground) on location in Queenstown New Zealand | "The stability of the footage is awesome, Jon continued, "It meant any slight motion blur artifacts, along with helicopter wobble that usually remain after stabilising out camera shake, wasn’t there." Jon also commented that "an enormous plus of the system was the huge pile of footage, - allowing for the magic that sometimes happens to be captured" On the footage subject Milne surmised that to have shot in 35mm the helicopter would have had to land every 12 minutes to reload, not practical for locations over cities, water or difficult terrain. The Toyota IMV project commercial will be released world-wide for television. Tony Monk Films has recently purchased a HD Cam SR recorder, which they say is more ideal for shipping and helicopter operation. Previously their full studio record / playback unit was used on all shoots. Recent projects also include a shoot for TBS and Skyworks UK, filming cities and locations around Europe. |