Tag Archives: helicopter

Thornton Quarry Video

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The Thornton Quarry lift job with Midwest Helicopters was a full day job so it provided a bunch of opportunity to try different things.  This was true for the stills but it also allowed me to experiment with the video as well.  Since the aircraft was operating all day, I was able to get to multiple locations and see all aspects of the job as they happened.  Normally, this isn’t possible since a lift will only last about 30 minutes.  In that case, you have to pick the location that will get the shots you must have and accept that the alternative shots will not be made.

This time I was able to move around the whole site and capture as much as possible of what was going on.  Some of the clips looked really interesting and the time but they actually proved to be no use.  Some of the boring stuff as it appeared at the time actually ended up being really of use when it came to editing.

At this point, it is important for me to apologize to people like Gerry Holtz.  Gerry is an editor and he does this sort of thing for a living.  Anyone else who knows about editing professionally, you are all due my apologies and my respect.  I am trying a bit with video editing but what I have learned is that it is bloody difficult to do.

On this shoot, most of the video was captured using my SLR.  The rest of it was shot on a GoPro which is such a great little device to get something a little more unusual.  It was handheld (or mounted in the case of the GoPro).  No tripods or dollies and certainly nothing as impressive as a Kessler Crane!

I suspect that to be good at editing it is important to have had some education in the process.  I am doing it the guy way – try something and then try something else and see what happens.  Not even a manual to consult!  Consequently, I make some progress but probably my approach starts from the wrong place.  If I was going to do a lot more of this I would take the training aspect seriously.  However, for the time-being, this is a little side hobby so I will probably stick with what I am doing.

Part of the fun(?) of the edit process is taking all of the disparate elements of the footage and trying to combine them into a coherent timeline.  Part of the engineer in me thinks it should be delivered in the same order it happened.  This is rubbish of course.  The viewer has no concern of course.  As long as the result doesn’t obviously have terrible jumps or continuity issues, no-one is going to be any the wiser.

Also, how much do they need to see.  About eighty lifts were done during the day.  Does the video need to have eighty lifts?  NO!  In the end, I concluded that two lifts were enough to tell the story.  One wasn’t enough but it didn’t need more than two.  I cut the length down as I went but even then it was still quite a long piece.  A pro would probably have it down to a couple of minutes but then, as I mentioned, I am not a video pro.

One lesson I have learned as I have practiced this video stuff is how many of the tools the software has are no use at all.  There are a million transitions between scenes, all of which make it look like you are experimenting with the software but they are a distraction from viewing.  I have learned to use simple transitions that are short so they are not obvious to the viewer.  They just stop the jump being the item the viewer focuses on.

Anyway, the final part of this story is that I was very happy with the result for this video.  Unfortunately, it turns out the company that was doing part of the work is very sensitive about their equipment and doesn’t like the equipment being shown on the video so I have had to remove it from my YouTube channel.  Consequently, I can’t include it in this post.  Oh well…

Thornton Quarry Part 2

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I mentioned before what the lift at the quarry involved.  However, I thought it was worth talking a little bit more about the work of the guys on the ground.  There was a good team spirit needed for this job and the guys worked hard throughout the day to get everything done.  With the many rolls of netting to put in place, there was plenty to do!  These were long rolls.  The later rolls were over 300′ long and they were hanging from 150′ of lifting line!  Also, it could be breezy and keeping the net under control was interesting!

There was one group of guys at the top of the quarry who were responsible for hooking up the nets.  They would put the roll into place and unroll it along the roadway.  When the helicopter came in, it had a special fixture on the end of the line.  This was a spreader bar with hooks for the net.  The bar was attached at the bottom but a ring was placed into a hook to turn it up the other way.  This meant that the hooks would be the right way up to hold the net.  When the release was triggered on the hook, the spreader bar would flip over and the net would fall free.  Then the whole thing could be repeated.

The other guys were on the top of the rock face ready to attach the net.  A wire line was rigged across the top of the rocks.  When the net came in, they guys had to grab the net, bring it into place and start wiring it to the line.  Two guys would be in harnesses and they would head over the edge as the net was lowered to ensure that it was aligned correctly and were it needed to be.  Joining each net down the rock face would follow another day.

The guys worked well together handling the nets into place and making sure they weren’t aligned incorrectly.  If the wind twisted the net, they had some good techniques for getting them back around the right way.  The was vital since the release would not work if it was facing the wrong way!  Jim was flying during all of this with a very long load so he did a great job to stay focused.

Thornton Quarry Part 1

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The main job of the day was at a quarry.  This was a more unusual job than the ones I have normally seen with Midwest.  For a start, it was a long job.  This was actually the second day of this job and a third would be required before it was finished.  The task is to place wire netting on rock faces to stop and falling rocks from flying freely at anything below.  The nets hold any debris against the rock face.

You will have seen things like this before.  However, if you are like me, you hadn’t really given any thought to how they are put there.  Today I am going to focus on the flying aspect of the job.  The work of the guys on the ground was a separate issue and I am going to give them their own posting to follow this one.

The rolls of net are laid out on the ground and picked up by the helicopter.  Then Jim had to fly this very long roll across to where it was supposed to be placed.  The guys on the ground would attach it and then Jim would lower the net down so the bottom became the top and the top ended up at the bottom.  There are over a hundred of these rolls and each one takes several minutes to place.  Consequently, it was necessary to land several times during the day.  One need was for fuel but another was for a break.  This is a long time to be hovering a helicopter!

The weather was really nice for the majority of the day and I was able to get around the site and see the work from many different locations.  I also got to have a break during the day which most people didn’t so it was easier for me.  Even so, I was bushed at the end of it all.  At least I got to fly back to base and not deal with the traffic!

McCook Lift

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As I hinted previously, my day with Midwest involved a couple of lifts.  The first was a relatively straightforward job.  In common with a lot of jobs it was cooling systems for the roof of a building that was being constructed.  The equipment was laid out on the ground near the building and the guys were ready to roll when we landed.

The location is quite close to Midway airport.  We talked to them as we came in and the traffic from the airport was close to where we were operating.  A couple of times, a low flying Boeing 737 from Southwest could sneak into my shot.  They were obviously well clear of us and there was no problem but it was quite fun to see something different in the background.

The job went off without too many issues and soon the aircraft was back on the ground and we could hop on to head to the next job.

Frosty Start

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The good team at Midwest Helicopter called me up recently to see if I wanted to go out on a job they had scheduled.  There were two jobs on the one day, one of which was going to be a long one.  Anyway, I need to get there first thing to be ready to head on out with the team.  I was going to ride in the aircraft so no messing around in Chicago traffic for me during the day.  Just sail across.

It had been a cold night so there was ice on the ground and frost on the aircraft.  I am not much use to the guys while they are getting ready.  Telling me what to do would probably take longer than doing it themselves and they would probably want to check whatever I had done anyway.  Therefore, I took the chance to get some shots on the ground of them getting ready and of the aircraft.

Normally I see the aircraft when it arrives at the job so getting it at rest was a nice change.  Also, the weather was great with lovely soft morning light so it was a great opportunity.  Here are some shots of the morning.  The jobs themselves will follow in the days to come.

Millennium Park and a Helicopter? Result!

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The good folks at Midwest Helicopters were recently undertaking another lift in downtown Chicago and invited me to come along.  This one required two goes since the date of the first attempt awoke to find cloud base down amongst the buildings – not ideal conditions for a flight of any sort let alone one that requires weaving between the buildings downtown.

The forecast for the second attempt was considerably better.  In the end it didn’t quite turn out that way with a slightly grey and overcast morning for the lift.  This was a mixed blessing really.  I was going to be facing east so would have had some awkward lighting angles if the sun had been strong.  However, cloudy skies are not a great backdrop.  This limits some of what you can get but, in this case that wasn’t too much of a problem.

Cloudy skies also soften the light in total which can avoid some of the harsher contrasts that you can get shooting aircraft.  Since Midwest’s fleet are painted orange and white, this contrast on the airframe alone can sometimes be a problem.  Moreover, I have a lot of pictures of their fleet.  Shots against a blue sky are not terribly new but something that brings in the different backgrounds in which the work is being done are a lot more interesting.

The location for the lift was a building directly across from Millennium Park.  This should be a photogenic location.  In advance of the job I was pondering where a good spot to shoot from would be.  Involving the Bean would be a good feature.  However, if I shot from near there, I would basically have one shot and miss the rest.  Getting a reflection in the Bean was another idea.  However, the shape of the Bean acts as a very wide angle viewer which means getting anything specific reflected in it – especially something not too large like a helicopter – is problematic.  The idea seems good but it is hard to make it happen.  If we had a second lift, I would certainly give it a go but I had to make this one count.

The roof was going to be the location of choice again.  This way I can get the aircraft with the park in the background, have it flying in front of other buildings, look down on it while it is low to the ground and also get some of what is happening on the roof as the load is set.  This was a little more tricky since I was actually operating mainly from a slightly lower section of roof than that on which the loads were being delivered.  I also had to make sure to keep myself out from underneath the path of the loads as they came up.

All in all, it went pretty well.  I got some good shots and most of what I was hoping for.  Sometimes you wish you could instruct the crew where to fly for the benefit of the shot but that isn’t why they are there!  However, it was funny at one point to look at the images and notice that Jim, the pilot, must have just spotted me as he brought a load up since he is briefly looking directly at me and grinning!  A couple of frames later and the grin is gone and he is back focused on the task – a task that requires quite a bit of concentration!

Global Aviation Resource Piece

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Realized that I haven’t been totally comprehensive in plugging one of my pieces.  If you don’t follow Facebook or Twitter (and in that case how do you even know that this is here?) then you won’t have seen a piece show up on Global Aviation Resource’s site that I wrote about Mauna Loa Helicopters.

 

Click on this link and you can see the article.

Movie Shooting

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One of the things that happens a lot in Chicago is the filming of movies. These can be small scale movies that will be unlikely to make a big impact to blockbusters. The recent Batman films were shot in Chicago for example. One film that really took over the city for a while was Transformers 3. I haven’t been to see the film – Netflix for that one I think – but they really destroyed the sections of the city around where I live if the trailers are anything to go by.

The city granted them an amazing amount of access including closing Michigan Avenue for quite some time. A lot was filmed across the river from us on Wacker Drive. Two aspects of the filming were fun for me. First they had made some pretty impressive effects for the cityscape with ripped up concrete and destroyed vehicles scattered around which you could get very close to. The second thing was the use of aerial filming. A lot of filming was done from an Astar and it seemed to spend a lot of time hovering near enough that I could take photos – admittedly through the windows which doesn’t always help.

They also had some skydivers both jumping from helicopters into the city and also base jumping from the buildings. I saw bits of that but was not close to it all. I did see a few sequences being set up. It is interesting just how long it takes for a sequence to be put together, rehearsed and finally shot. I saw a bunch of guys on wires getting hauled into the air numerous times before they finally shot it with the explosions going live.

They also filmed a sequence with explosions along the rooftops of a number of buildings along the ricer. We should have been suspicious as we sat in our living room in the evening when we heard the helicopter again but it was only as the buildings started erupting that we realized what was happening.

I have no great interest in the movie itself but, having seen so much of the filming work underway, I shall have to watch it just to see the places we know so well getting mashed!

Navy Pier Lift

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Regular followers of this blog will know that I do a lot of jobs with Midwest Helicopters.  Earlier this week I got a call from Jim telling me that they were planning a job at Navy Pier later in the week.  Given the location of the pier, the possibility of some nice city backdrops was very tempting.  Where to shoot from would depend on where the actual lift was.  For those who haven’t been there, Navy Pier is pretty long!

I went to the website to try and get a contact on the pier who might be able to get me into a location that would be good for shooting.  They have a contact for people wishing to photograph (commercially) on the pier so  I contacted the person and they got back to me a while later.  Turns out, the pier is very focused on what is necessary to get a shoot arranged.  They had a series of terms, most of which were not a problem with the exception of getting them named on my insurance overnight!  They also had a fee which was quite substantial.  Since the shoot was associated with some work for them, they were prepared to consider waiving the fee.  However, the manager was out and by now the lift was the following morning.

Outstanding commitment on the part of my contact meant I got the all clear at 10:30 the night before.  I am very grateful that they tried so hard and it was certainly nice to be totally legitimate.  The morning dawned with some very promising conditions.  We all rolled up to the site and got set.  Unfortunately, the loads were not ready so the lift was postponed for half an hour while the rigging was set up.

Eventually we went ahead.  A theater on the pier has a fabric cover that had been ripped in a storm.  The new covers were going up and a damaged vent was being brought down.  The guys receiving the loads were working on some temporary cable rigging under the main beams.  They were not in much of a position to manhandle the loads as they came in so Jim was a busy guy making very fine adjustments from the helicopter to get everything in place.  He did a great job and I was well positioned to get some good shots.  I particularly liked the angle looking down the roof line at the heart of the Ferris wheel behind the theater.

I was with Brian on the parking deck.  He had an idea for a shot that I hadn’t considered.  He would be hooking on the lift line as the helicopter hovered at head height.  He wanted a shot that was a city panorama with the hook up as part of the scene.  I hadn’t considered doing a pano with action in it before but gave it a go.  I actually tried several during the lift and they actually came out quite well.

Stitching the pano of Brian was harder than I thought.  Photoshop did a great job of creating the pano and totally excluding the helicopter since it was only in one shot.  However, the layer was still there so some delicate masking work could bring it back in.  It was actually really cool to watch it appear on the monitor.  The pano is not something that will always have a place on a shoot but it is an interesting idea to add to the shoot list.

For more pictures of the lift, you can go to this gallery.