Aerial Photography

In the pilot episode of MotorSport Ranch we didn’t have the budget for aerial photography and at the time HD cameras were too heavy to mount to remote controlled helicopters. One of the members of MotorSport Ranch owned a helicopter he chartered for various news organizations and offered to take our camera man up for a few aerial shots of the track and our race. While this was a great opportunity, we hadn’t planned for an aerial shoot and didn’t have the appropriate mounting equipment to fix our camera in the helicopter. We decided to go hand held and as a result very few of the shots were usable. Here are a few pictures:

The guys at VOOM insisted we have aerial shots in the series so we began looking for inexpensive solutions for aerial shots throughout the shooting schedule. It would have been cost prohibative to keep a real helicopter on the set for the entire week so we opted for a remote control option. By the time we began shooting the series, Sony had released a very small 3-chip HD camera that could film in 1080i and were we able to mount it on a remote controlled helicopter. It took two people to control the remote control helicopter; one to fly the helicopter and another to control the camera. It was interesting listening to the two operators bicker. The camera controller watched the footage via a wireless 2.4 ghz feed to his monitor. Here are a few photos of the rig: