First I had to learn to fly a model helicopter which is easier than you might think. I started with a twin rotor electric helicopter called a Twister Medevac which is stable and very easy to fly. I began discussing the model in various forums and I turned to video to help me do that.
I became intrigued with how to film the model, especially when it was in flight. Believe it or not I made a cap with the camera on my head.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJL9fYK9p2g[/youtube]
So I spent many hours mastering the controls and finally got to this level of competence.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPzZ2p9Jqbk[/youtube]
I crashed a few times and had to learn to repair it and this prompted me to write a guide to doing this.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSOzB8emCBI[/youtube]
Now a small electric helicopter is never going to lift a camera so if you want to get your movie camera airborne your going to have to progress to a larger model. I decided to build my own and seek professional training to convert to petrol helicopters which have huge lifting ability. Here is the build process. Let me say right now, the build process does not take 5 minutes !!!!! I just chose to show it in five minutes but one or two people viewing on youtube didnt seem to get that
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y64jVlvqW0M[/youtube]
A word of warning here folks, these helicopters are by no means toys and in the wrong hands they can be deadly. The blades are long, hard and rotate at thousands of revolutions per minute. I made my first flight under the guidance of an expert on a dual control system but from that moment I was hooked. The model flys just like the real thing subject to the same laws of flight. A big difference of course is that you get no physical feedback as your not sitting in the machine. The hardest thing to master is whats called nose-in flight, when the front of the model is pointing directly at you. Can you think why ? Its because all of the control stick manoeuvres become reversed.
Anyway, the big day came when my self built model was ready to fly and I was ready to go solo. In this video you see my instructor Paul Heckles testing my helicopter and then I fly it without the safety net of dual controls for the first time ever. By the way, I was having a really bad hat day. It was freezing.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkGH88N3-hY[/youtube]
Once I had learnt how to fly the machine with confidence then I started my experiments with attaching a camera. I had an old samsung digital stills camera that was expendable and so I used Mechano strips to build a very rudimentary frame secured to skids of my helicopter with plastic cable ties. I mounted the camera onto this frame and took to the sky. This was the first attempt. I am trying to find the stills I took of the attachment but no luck so far...
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlcCxLcCAZI[/youtube]
That had quite a bit of vibration on it so I just put thick foam underneath the frame where it contacted the skids and this smoothed things out really well. This video is of my instructor giving the camera a work out. He turned to me during the flight and asked 'Is the camera on tight?' and then did this
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IxjXHDtDu4[/youtube]
This final movie was the last flight I ever did with my skycam. Someone bet that I would not have the courage (or stupidity) to fly the camera over water. I thought about it for a while and thought what the heck so I took the helicopter to a place called beachy head on the South coast of England with the intention of flying the model out over the cliffs to see if I could capture the lighthouse. So with a very small audience consisting of early morning walkers and their dogs I took off and flew backwards and forwards along the Sussex downs, but staying firmly over land. I couldn't bring myself to fly out over the edge. I kept telling myself the model will fly just as well out over the sea as it does over land so what's the big deal. The big deal was I had about £2000 worth of equipment in the sky and if the engine died and it went to the bottom that there was no way to retrieve it. You can see what happened here.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXmdIMVARSc[/youtube]
Building and flying the helicopter was a lot of fun but to be honest its not really the way to go about getting aerial shots of your neighbourhood. The risks are far too great to go flying over other peoples property and the noise would also upset a lot of people. A far better way would be to use some kind of helium balloon tethered to the ground and to build a simple platform onto which to mount the camera. You could use a very cheap radio control transmitter to tilt and turn that camera to where you want to film.
On a holiday in Iceland I watched a couple of guys suspending a camera from a kite which they then flew out over a cliff to get some shots of a waterfall. The trouble with a kite of course is that it needs a constant wind to keep it aloft. Sadly they didn't have one and we all watched as it slowly sank to the bottom of the cliff. I have some pictures of this somewhere I will see if I can include them here.
Now lets see who can come up with a method for obtaining the simplest aerial shots that everyone could achieve
Shrimp
