Software aids aerial camera design

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team May 13, 2008

SpaceCam Systems of Los Angeles debuted the Snakehead last month in the canyons of Baja, Mexico, for the upcoming James Bond film "Quantum of Solace".

A movie camera system called the Snakehead, designed entirely in SolidWorks 3D CAD software, is immersing viewers more deeply than ever in aerial action.

With the Snakehead, pilots for the first time can fly as aggressively as they dare without sacrificing the drama of the shot.

SpaceCam Systems of Los Angeles debuted the Snakehead last month in the canyons of Baja, Mexico, for the upcoming James Bond film "Quantum of Solace".

The month-long shoot was "wildly successful", according to veteran aerial cinematographer Dwayne McClintock, also a mechanical engineer who co-designed the system.

"We shot some astonishing footage, like nothing you've seen before", he said.

The Snakehead also worked "flawlessly" on a TV commercial in which a Jeep rolled out the door of a cargo plane 10,000 feet above the desert sand.

With a 360-degree remotely controlled spherical range of view, the Snakehead is the first plane-mounted gyroscopically stabilised periscope, compatible with various movie and HD cameras and providing super high-quality resolution.

The lens system maintains a level horizon, solidifying a frame of reference to keep viewers in the story.

Traditional aerial cinematography approaches - for example, a fixed periscope on a Lear jet - distract and sometimes sicken viewers by depicting a seemingly lurching horizon.

If the filming plane needs to adopt the point of view of a chasing aircraft, however, Snakehead operators can turn off the stabilisation to convey its manoeuvres.

"As they will see in the Bond film, the Snakehead puts moviegoers in the middle of the action instead of just observing, or worse, being virtually tossed around in the theater", said McClintock.

"The Snakehead is by far the most challenging design I've ever attempted".

"SolidWorks software's efficiency made the work so much easier than it could have been".

"SolidWorks let us design a better product by cycling through dozens of iterations and working with flexible subassemblies".

"We had many original crazy and weird-looking parts that, thanks in large part to SolidWorks, went together seamlessly the first time".

"The Snakehead exceeded our expectations".

In the Bond filming, a Piper Aerostar 700 with Snakeheads on the nose and tail filmed two planes in a aerial chase sequence and dogfight.

SpaceCam collaborated on the design with engineers at Ballista of Westlake Village, California, which engineered the optics, also using SolidWorks software.

The Snakehead posed several significant design challenges for the combined team, including battering from weather and debris, mechanical rotation and image inversion (Ballista used SolidWorks to create a fourth, "derotation" prism to keep the filmed image upright in the periscope)".

"What I like most about SolidWorks is the flexibility", said Walt Caldwell, Vice President of production and operations for Ballista".

"Whenever you start a project with nothing but an idea you wind up in a different place than you thought you would, constantly making multiple iterations with major changes".

"SolidWorks lets us quickly change a component and replace it with a new one and all the mates and parent/child relationships are intact".

"SolidWorks makes major changes easy, without having to start the model all over again".