Teaser shot on dragon Lowlight OLPF.

[Björn Benckert]

Something we did right before Christmas.
It was dark, it was cold and we were struggling with technical stuff but camera worked just fine.

This was shot on epic dragon Lowlight OLPF and I think we transcoded at 4000 iso and used a ultra wide ultra Prime. We went out there to do it with the milo and shoot moco plates, however the milo did not like the weather, as it got really blistering cold. Normally that is not an issue, but this time it was that strange really humid kind of cold, so after a few minutes I could not even see the screen of my laptop as it had a few milimters of ice on it, then a few minutes later the milo went on a strike, while all the extras (dressed in part clothes) where freezing their asses off. So we where in a freezing "I need a super techno crane" kind of situation, and luckily we could get such before everyone turned ice popsicle. But sadly the techno here does not have the moco functions. So, we had to call it a day or just go for it and shoot like we had moco even though we did not, which we of course did and it actually worked quite well to stitch the plates together, considering the circumstances.

the actual flick.

More info on our webpage: http://www.syndicate.se/mello-2016-teaser/

Pictures of the E-stop and had controller with some frost on it.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Great videos, and thank you for sharing. I could not have asked for better learning!

By the way, what is moco functions, and why would you need it in this shoot?

Well early on I sold the idea of having houses on both side of the street to the client... And in real there where only houses on the right hand side. So our plan was to duplicate those by offsetting the camera move 90 degrees and shoot a second pass for the extra houses and people walking on the left side of the limo... well the milo (our motion control / moco crane) froze up on us before we even had a first take. And as we sold a nice crane move to the client we needed a new crane, so best second option was the techno crane, some techo cranes you can program so they can repeat the move... well this one, that we got, did not have such features. So Nikolai the techno crane operator and Jocke our DP had to basically try to make the same move twice involving all axises on the crane... which they managed to do at a good enough level so that the 3D guys could later camera project the two takes onto a 3D model of the scenery and re align the two camera takes that had almost similar moves so they worked as one. Basically one pas for the right hand side and one for the left side...

So moco features on a techno is... to be able to repeat a made move. Some techno cranes has that feature. Some techno cranes even have, like the milo, a function that lets them digest a 3D made / Virtual camera move and play that out on the rig... this one we had only got some intelligent feature like making a straight line instead of a banana when pushing the rotate axis. In other words it uses the extend of the arm to work against the radius move and turn it into a linear one.