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UAV Cameras an Eye In the Sky For Adventurous Filmmakers
First time accepted submitter NRI-Digital writes "Could the use of unmanned aerial vehicles open up a whole new world of filmmaking? UAV manufacturer Schiebel and media company Snaproll Media recently teamed up to test Schiebel's Camcopter on an aerial film shoot. Whether filming volcanic eruptions or zipping through forest tree-lines, UAVs have the potential to get shots that manned helicopters would struggle to manage. It's still a young, niche industry, but as costs come down, these little vehicles could become a common sight on the film shoots of the future."
Go to www.rcgroups.com, visit the multi-rotor forum in the RC helis section ( http://www.rcgroups.com/multi-rotor-helis-659/ ) Hundreds of amateurs tinkering with 'drones', some just flying them around a field for fun, others doing a bit of aerial photography with 'em. And they've been doing it for quite a while... A lot of the lower-end builds are stabilised by a combination of an Arduino, Wii Motion Plus, and the open-source MultiWii software. Higher-end multicopters can have actively stabilised camera mounts, and be carrying fairly high-end camera gear.
Strangely enough, the last message transmitted from the UAV to control was, "I'm afraid I can't do that Dave..."
At least one noted film director is already using UAVs. Werner Herzog used a Skybot UAV made by British Technical Films for the opening sequence in Cave of Forgotten Dreams - the camera moves through a vineyard before soaring up and revealing the countryside of the Combe d'Arc where the cave art was found. It's an impressive shot in 2D but in 3D it takes your breath away.
My father was a tremendous model airplane, and photography, enthusiast. In 1962 he strapped his Leica to the bottom of one of his radio-controlled models and took black-and-white photos of the airfield where he flew his models, and the adjacent industrial plant. The shutter was tripped by the Leica's built-in timer; he got pictures of approximately what he wanted by running a second timer on the ground and ensuring the plane was in right place at the right time. The timer was used because the radio-control equipment of the day (at least, the equipment he could afford) had only one channel, used for rudder control. He used black-and-white film so that he could do his own developing; besides the fact that he just liked doing it, doing his own developing allowed him to compensate for things like underexposures. (To compensate for vibration blur, present despite all of his anti-vibration efforts, he was always underexposing these shots.)
By 1971, the R/C art had improved to the point that multichannel radio equipment (4 to 6 channels) was commonplace, and the photographic art had improved to the point that small, lightweight motion-picture cameras were also affordable. To take advantage, he took a handheld Super 8 mm movie camera and mounted it on a wire frame on the fuselage over the wing, pointed ahead and slightly down, so that the arc of the propeller was just visible in the resulting images (to give scale). He quickly learned to fly very slowly and gently; images taken during even the most mundane of maneuvers would be enough to induce nausea when viewed on the screen later.
Because of the consumer-grade equipment used, these photos and films will never win any prizes for photographic art; still, it is always a pleasure to see something state-of-the-art in its time, turn into something available at Wal-Mart a few years later.