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.
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!
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.
I have been gradually working my way through a bunch of old shots from the days when I didn’t delete anything. These days such carelessness with storage cannot be tolerated so I am a lot more aggressive about culling out the weak. Anyway, during the review of older stuff, I came across this shot and it made me chuckle and seemed like a great candidate for a caption competition. In the previous shot the guy inside is not in the doorway so he miraculously appeared as the other guy went out. Feel free to make your own comments below!
Got a message earlier in the week from my buddy Jim at Midwest Helicopters. Another job was coming up, this time up in Wrigleyville, and would I like to tag along? Of course I would. How likely is it that I would turn down an opportunity to shoot an aviation job, particularly one with the Midwest guys that are always so good to me?
After a week with some variable weather, Saturday morning turned out to be pretty good. It doesn’t seem very long ago that we were gathering for these lifts before the sun was up 
and when the mercury was certainly very low on the scale. To be out when the temperature was above 40F was a great change.
I hopped up on the the roof where the equipment was to go and set myself up. I had a great view of the pick location down on the street and could easily move to see where the cell phone transmission equipment was going. Only problem was that the sun was directly on front of me that way.
Since I have shot these operations a few times before, I decided to try a couple of tighter shots as well as the more regular stuff, hopefully including a few with Wrigley Field in the 
background. The lift went well and I got some good shots. You can see more of them here if you want.
Thanks again to the team at Midwest. Always appreciate you letting me join the jobs and the team are always good for a laugh early in the morning.
If you want to see more shots of the lift, click here to see more of the lift.