Top Gear In car Moco

Top gear rather liked the idea of doing something slightly different to the usual fixed minicams. I rigged the slider into passenger seat of my "testing" Peugeot and did a test. The rig was then installed in an Aston Martin Vantage V12, All the kit was mounted inside the car .. pre programmed by myself and the director and then triggered by Jeremy Clarkson pressing a switch to start a ten minete long move.

Slider in a Peugeot Test car

Extra Long Belt and High Speed Dolly Motor

The client on this job wanted to track at 2 1/2 M/s with the Photron camera on the head. 2 1/2 M/S was just possible by removing all unnessesary weight and fitting a different motor with a larger gear. A longer belt was required as althoguh the dolly could get to speed in two metres it took four metres to slow down .. I now have a 100ft (30 Metre) belt

LongBelt

Masterprime Reversing Rig

Because of their weight it's very difficult to reverse masterprimes .. imagine all the weight of that lens on a single clamp on ring reversing to a PL mount. (and the embaressment should it fall off). I have (with Hayward engineering) built a reversing rig for masterprimes ..

The rig holds the camera by it's 19mm baseplate so it can be used with a number of different cameras and keep the lens centred. I have also set it up with a Nikon digital still camera for testing purposes.

Reversing rig with Digital Camera

Here is the setup and the results of a test made with a 35mm masterprime and then shot on a nikon digital still camera, the subject was a 25mm high plastic figure of a world war one soldier. The pictures are from a mobile phone or from my "Testing camera" They all link to a full res image.

Scale Reference

This soldier was photographed at a significant distance from the lens to allow for lighting.

Distance between the rear element and the rig.

These are the two pictures .. one at T1.3 and another at T22

Head of the soldier at T1.3Head of the soldier at T22

The focus is obtained by moving the camera back and forward on the slider. And can be preset or motion controlled ..

Commonwealth War Graves Commision.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission is building what will probably be the last First world war cemetery at Fromelle in Northern France they asked Daniel Alexander to take some photographs of the construction and also to make a timelapse of the construction.

Daniel asked me to help him build a camera system to shoot this.

Box with lid onBox without lid

I built the box with a computer to control the camera (Canon 50d) and I wrote some software to control the camera and to blow off rain, wash the glass and heat the glass (although the heat of the computer running keeps the glass clear) and to vent the box if it gets too hot .. Everything is powered via a UPS that will run the camera for a whole week. Although the computer is internet connected via the mobile network, due to the ammount of data involved the images are downloaded to hard disks and removed manually ..

The camera is now running at the site in Fromelle

Alpella.

I particularly enjoyed this job, especially working with Gaute and Anders.      We shot the backgrounds first around Istambul at 1 fps to make it easier to remove the traffic.    Then we shot the fingerboards in a studio with a scaled set.     Gaute and Anders

For me the notable shots were ..

In the first shot we removed the drivers seat and the back seat from a small car and mounted the slider fore-aft .. we then shot the same move with the windscreen removed.

For the “Car park” shot we under-slung a Ronford seven (as we did not need pan and tilt on that shot).

Fat bloke underslung cameraFor the track into the bus. The slider was underslung rigged out from the dolly so in theory we could have tracked left to right on that shot as the skateboard weaved towards the bus. In fact we shot it as a straight track in .. There was lots of talk beforehand about how we could shoot the fingerboard for this shot in the studio .. The problem was that the camera was so low in the original shot that if we had tried to track that low in the studio we would have been under the floor with the camera. We built a small motion control conveyor belt, we loaded the conveyor with green paper from a colourama roll and then scaled the track axis from the original shot to the conveyor belt .. although it took a day to build and test the conveyor belt, the actual shot took about a ¼ of an hour from start to finish in the studio ..