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Perfect Horizon effectively neutralizes the extraneous
motion encountered in boats, camera cars, snowmobiles or
other vehicles, leaving the pan/tilt head and camera
stable and level with the horizon.
Credits:
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Step into
Liquid, Blue Crush, Die Another Day
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For
the 2003 surf documentary Step into Liquid, Director Dana
Brown set out to record the best footage ever of big-wave surfing
at Cortez Bank, 100 miles off the shore of California. The results
were arresting: Witness the likes of Ken “Skindog” Collins
ripping down the faces of 65-foot giants. Action-sports eye candy?
Sure. But it was filmed with an elegance approaching that of
poetry—no mean feat, considering that the camera boat was riding
the same swells. Capturing steady shots required fistfuls of
Dramamine and an innovative, Sci-Tech Award–nominated camera
mount known as Perfect Horizon.
Even in filmmaking’s digital age, many problems must still be
solved mechanically, with gears, grease, bolts, cables, and years
of an obscure inventor’s passion. Need to show racehorses
charging into the camera? Use the Sci-Tech Oscar-winning
Technocrane, which swivels, swoops, and extends 50 feet. Need a
shot from a motorcycle at 150 mph? Try nominee Doggicam System’s
Sparrow Head, an ultra-steady, wirelessly operated remote camera
head.
Perfect Horizon is the brainchild of David Grober, a veteran
marine-production coordinator for films and the founder of a
company called Motion Picture Marine. “Throughout the years, I
saw that it would have been really helpful to have a small, easily
transportable camera-stabilization system,” he says. Some
earlier devices employed gyros to counteract aquatic motion but
also tended to fight intentional movements by the camera operator,
and systems powered by hydraulics were heavy and messy. In 1999,
after years of tinkering, Grober released his own invention.
His key breakthroughs: electronic sensors to detect motion and a
computer to calculate the appropriate stabilizing reactions. The
core of the unit is a gimbal that swivels nimbly from side to side
and forward and backward so that no matter what happens below it,
the camera platform remains level with the horizon. Finessing the
twin electric motors that power the mount’s correctional
movements was Grober’s biggest challenge. “If you have any
sort of backlash, you’ll see it onscreen,” he says. Perfect
Horizon has evolved substantially since its debut. The latest
version is waterproof, housed in carbon fiber and aluminum, and
lightweight (30 pounds, versus the 130 of the original). It can be
perched atop a tripod with the camera mounted directly above, or
be suspended beneath a crane; the camera is controlled as it would
normally be, with full pan and tilt abilities.
Perfect Horizon’s sea legs have also proved effective on land.
It has been deployed on cars (Seabiscuit) and golf carts (Spanglish)—as
well as on boats (Die Another Day) and jet skis (the
upcoming Hitch). Perhaps the most imaginative use was for a
scene in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in which
Harry takes a manic journey on board a triple-decker bus. For
shots of the interior havoc—sliding beds, a swinging
chandelier—filmmakers built a full-scale model of the bus and
positioned it on top of a swaying platform. Inside, the camera was
placed on a Perfect Horizon mount. With the visual perspective
level, audiences were able to grasp that the bus was tipping back
and forth. “That was the only way they could do that shot,”
Grober says.
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By James Vlahos, Courtesy of Popular
Science
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