Laurence Hamilton-Baillie describes what he learned over two years shooting with drones in some of the planet’s most remote and inhospitable locations

tanzania

Drone Kit Used

  • Custom folding octocopter, adapted from a Skyknight X8 airframe
  • Custom three-axis brushless gimbal with a 32bit AlexMos controller
  • Two Spektrum DX8 controllers
  • Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera with a 14-42mm lens, iris/record/zoom control and 13 stops of dynamic range
  • Three six-cell 4500mah batteries per flight, allowing 15 minutes of flight time
  • Three Black Pearl SD wireless monitors
  • Dji F330 quadcopter
  • Dji Zenmuse H4-3D camera gimbal and GoPro Hero 4 camera
  • Dji Phantom 2 quadcopter with GoPro H3-3D gimbal and GoPro Hero 3 Black Edition

To film the latest series of Primal Survivor for National Geographic, we travelled to some of the most remote and inhospitable environments in the world.

This made filming the aerials with our two multirotors a real challenge. Recent advances in multirotor technology have led to an explosion of interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) over the past few years. UAVs – commonly known as drones – are becoming easier to fly, but keeping them maintained and flying safely in such remote and unfamiliar environments is often the most difficult aspect of the job.

Hiking through the dense jungle of the Darrien Gap is hard enough, let alone with an octocopter on your back. Support cars were a rare luxury, so travelling with camels, horses, yaks or dugout canoes became the norm. As a result, the UAV kit had to be seriously condensed and field repairs often became the only option. Carrying lots of spare parts was simply not possible.

We had two multirotors with us: a large folding octocopter and a small quadcopter. Each had its own strengths and weaknesses and they complemented each other well. The octocopter could carry a range of cameras and enabled us to deliver more complicated shots on a longer lens.

drone

Papua New Guinea: Laurence pilots his octocopter in front of villagers from Yimas 2 on the banks of the Karawari River

Splitting the work
Having a separate operator controlling just the camera allowed me to focus on flying. Exposure control, start/stop recording and horizon- levelling functions allowed us to eliminate factors that might otherwise ruin the perfect picture.

The quadcopter was more transport- able and could be flown in much tighter spaces, under the canopy of dense jungles or through narrow gorges with only a few inches of manoeuvring space either side of the propellers.

This system, however, relied on me both flying the quadcopter and framing the shot by watching the monitor. This first-person-view method of flying gives you the sensation that you are actually sitting inside the quadcopter.

Meanwhile, a spotter has to keep an eye on the aircraft itself and the surrounding airspace to make sure you don’t reverse into anything.

The biggest challenge was getting the equipment in and out of the filming locations. Whether it was holding the octocopter above the breaking waves as we tried and failed to launch our tiny boat off the beach in Panama, or holding it on the back of a snowmobile as we bounced across the frozen arctic tundra, the kit was being put through its paces before it even took off.

Crowd control also became an issue. In each location we were filming with a different tribe and their reactions varied. The yak-herding nomads of the Himalayas barely bothered looking up, but the tribe in Papua New Guinea thought it was the strangest thing they had ever seen. The whole tribe would turn out for every flight and the only shots we could get of village life were of either a completely deserted village or an enormous crowd of smiling, dancing villagers staring and waving up at the camera.

Later, another tribe further up the river caught wind of our filming and became jealous. The fixer and I arrived to find a few of them pacing up and down the riverbank yelling furiously and waving their machetes around. A quick flyby of their village with the children and elders crowded around the video monitor quickly got us onto more friendly terms.

Being able to fly a smooth shot with co-ordinated camera movements was often only half the battle. The stand-out shots in the edit were those in which all of the contributors’ actions were well choreographed.

This took a lot of time to set up as we often needed two translators: one to translate the instructions into the local country’s language; another to translate from that into the tribe’s own dialect. Chinese whispers would occur and we might end up with a tribesman running off to make us a cup of tea when we had asked him to herd his goats towards us.

drone-2

Laurence with more Yimas 2 villagers

For the Himalayan episode, we spent ages moving large herds of yaks and people into position, only for complete mayhem to ensue as soon as the octocopter took off and all the surprised yaks literally ran for the hills.

Some shoots required specific modifications to the gear to compensate for the extreme conditions. Flying at 4,500m in the Himalayas, I had much shorter flight times to get the shots, even after stripping a third of the weight off the octocopter. In Arctic Norway, the batteries froze within minutes unless I took off almost immediately after setting up. And in Sulawesi and the Sahara, everything would become too hot to touch if left for more than a few minutes.

It’s been a steep learning curve since my first shoot in the Ecuadorian jungle two years ago. It’s an exciting area of the profession to be in at the moment as the technology, its range of potential applications and the legal framework improves year on year.

  • Primal Survivor is produced by Icon Films and airs on National Geographic’s international channels in early 2016

My tricks of the trade: Flying in extreme environments

  • Condense the kit as much as possible. Apart from batteries, everything I use fits into two cases (reduced to one once I’m on location).
  • Make sure the kit is packed well to survive the bumpiest of journeys. Speed boats on rough water or Land Cruisers driving off-road will put much more stress on the kit than when it’s flying. If you pack it well enough to withstand a drop from 1 metre high, it stands a better chance of arriving on location in one piece.
  • Compromise on the camera when flying in remote locations. Lots of people fly Reds, which are great if you’re always operating from a vehicle, but there is a range of small and portable cameras that allow longer flights and require less faffing between shots. These include the Panasonic GH4 and the Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera.
  • A complicated shot may take two or three attempts to get right, but it’s better to use up a set of batteries nailing a single shot than to fly around randomly pointing the camera at whatever happens to look cool.
  • Make sure everyone has a radio. When the drone is in the air, the noise can make it difficult to hear what anyone is saying and the presenter may be unaware that filming has stopped.
  • Firmware or hardware settings will need to be tweaked to deal with changes in temperature or altitude, so I take a laptop and small toolkit wherever I go.

 

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