Pushing Technical Boundaries with Earflight

A small camera was attached to bald eagle to capture a bird's eye view of the Grand Canyon.

JACKSON HOLE, WYO. At the 2013 Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, Earthflight, a six-part series produced for the BBC and aired on PBS last Fall, received a special jury award for technical achievement. It also recently received an Emmy for cinematography in the News and Documentary category and likely will earn many more awards over time for its jaw-dropping cinematography. Earthflight takes the viewer soaring heavenward into migration milestones and rare avian assemblies around the globe. Moreover, it employs every feasible technological trick of the trade to immerse the viewer in the aerial action so that they feel like they're soaring and flapping with the eagles, condors and other great birds featured, so that it's just like being there, as co-production partner Discovery Channels likes to boast.

GLOBAL IN SCALE

Underpinning this hi-tech tour de force is Executive Producer, John Downer's commitment to use the best technology available at the moment to tell his ambitious story. With Earthflight,' I wanted to push the technical boundaries and do something global in scale. The natural events and wildlife of each continent, seen from the viewpoint of migrating birds, seemed the best, natural way to do so, he said.

For starters, Downer planned to update techniques developed for a program on birds in flight, produced earlier in his career, by taking full advantage of technological advances since then. When shooting 10-minute rolls of film, the camera always seemed to run out just when things started happening, he said. With today's digital cinema cameras that rarely happens, but there are always new challenges. In our first year of filming, we had chronic problems with dropped frames due to vibration of the hard drives while filming in ultra-lites.

Philip Dalton piloting the Octocopter carrying a 3D rig in the Masai Mara, Kenya.

Curiously, Earthflight 's four-year long production timetable became a major asset by giving technology a chance to catch up to meet Downers' goals. At the very start we had little of the technology we came to count on, he said. But we knew it was coming and so planned our production schedule with that in mind. If the technical advances hadn't arrived as promised, we'd have a very different show. We started without a main digital cine camera that could even shoot much above 25 fps, hence, Red One made a big difference with 60p.

Luckily for Downer, Red Digital introduced its Red Epic midway into the series. Red Epics were huge, by giving us most of the frame rates we needed in one camera, he said. Its larger format added stabilization and allowed us to get multiple shots out of one, by cropping the frame.

The ability to overcrank Epics to 240 fps in HD meant that they could use it to capture much of the breathtaking slow-motion imagery of birds in flight that became Earthflight's signature. However, even 240 fps wasn't fast enough to slow down water droplets bouncing off the wings of imprinted (barnacle) geese, flying in formation with Downer's ultra-lite. That's where the Photrons and [Vision Research] Phantoms with 1000 fps were invaluable, said Senior Producer Philip Dalton. We mostly used Photrons which combined ultra high-speed with high optical quality and dependability, plus were more affordable for long stints afield.

However, the Phantom has a large magazine [drive] that enables you to capture several minutes of footage at the highest speeds and resolution speeds before filling up the hard drive, Dalton continued. With the Photron we were limited to a minute or so at 1000 fps before having to offload. But with pre-roll that's often enough for several shots. Plus you can preview in the field and quickly delete inferior shots in the camera, to shoot longer between downloads.

UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE

POV cameras were also key to capturing an intimate portrait of mass bird movements across the continents, from the perspective of individual birds, according to Dalton.

Initially we downsized smaller AVCHD camcorders to attach to large birds like condors, eagles and African vultures in order to capture their lofty perspective, he said. Initially we modified Sony EX1s, but shifted to Canon XF 305s and 105s once they became available. We also mounted Canon 5Ds on miniature gliders, including our VultureCam' to film our target birds in flight, at very close range.

Downer's team also used Canon XF105s and 305s as remote camouflage-cams by inserting them into rocks, stumps, and even carcasses and operating them with customized pan-tilt controls. Towards the end of production they increasingly deployed GoPros as critter-cams. Miniature cameras have gotten better and lighter, rapidly, Dalton said. Unfortunately GoPro3s came in a bit late in the day for us. But GoPro2s made it much easier to mount an HD camera on a flying bird. We used them a fair bit in our last year of production.

3D Version Coming

JACKSON HOLE, WYO. John Downer's team used RUVs, high-speed cameras, 2D and 3D cameras shot from ultralites, (as well as on the ground, mounted on tripods, jibs, and handheld), and sometimes POV cameras mounted on birds in Panama City to capture tens of thousands of hawks overflying it one peak day. In Africa they used RUVs to capture low, slow aerials of lions and crocodiles hunting, plus dense flocks of flamingos feeding and nesting on treacherous alkali lakes.

Philip Dalton uses video goggles to assess 3D footage acquired by a drone.

We also used them to capture slow, low-angle dolly shots' over Victoria Falls in Africa and Angel Falls in Argentina, Dalton said. Moreover, since they're much quieter than helicopters they generally don'

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