Ted Oakes: When you watch a feature film, just about every shot is a tracking shot, where the camera is moving horizontally along with the action. The reason Hollywood uses it is because it immerses you in the action, and it's easy to achieve because you can tell the actors to walk from A to B and then you have a camera on a dolly, and you follow them as they do it. But we can't do that with wildlife and natural history films because we can't lay a track, or we don't have a road. You can ask an actor to run along the road and then film from the road, but you can't do that with wild animals.
Just say you wanted to follow a herd of migrating reindeer with the camera. In the old days, you'd place a cameraman with a tripod where the reindeer are going to pass. He'd wait and film the reindeer as they pass, but it's a nonmoving shot. So I wanted to be able to move on rougher terrain with the animals. Not only that, I wanted the ability to use an HD camera that would have a telephoto lens so we weren't disturbing their behavior. On Planet Earth they were using gyrostabilized cameras to film from helicopters, which vibrate a lot. The fact that gyrostabilized cameras can remove the vibration means you can film with a telephoto lens without disturbing the behavior of the animals. I wanted to be able to do the same thing from a vehicle—to be moving along with the animals from a sufficient distance so that it didn't disturb their behavior. The gyros in the cameras create inertia, which removes the high-frequency vibrations. But what they can't remove is the larger movements of the vehicle.
PM: So how did you do it, exactly?
TO: It's done for horse racing—when you see a horse-racing shot of a horse race, that is what you are seeing is a gyrostabilized camera physically bolted on the roof of a vehicle, which is driving on a road around the track. I got one of those vehicles from Aerial Camera Systems, our partner in the project. I went out to a field in Wales with a sheep dog and a flock of sheep and we drove around while the dog was herding. But that setup didn't work because there wasn't sufficient stabilization. The shots weren't steady enough.
So we started thinking—how are we going to make it work? Then a cameraman suggested mounting the camera on a jib arm with weights on the other end. There was a pivot in the middle, and the arm would float in a neutral horizontal position. Kind of like when you put your finger in the middle of the pencil—the pencil is heavier at one end than at the other. So we put the weights at the end where the eraser is and the camera at the pointy end. And that was just floating there in the back of the vehicle on a mount about three feet off the bed of the vehicle with a camera at the other end.
When we rigged this arm up we found we had amazing stabilization. The gyrostabilized HD camera is removing the high-frequency vibrations from the engine of the vehicle and the arm is removing the bigger movements of the vehicle. The camera system is so heavy that it's got its own inertia, so it almost doesn't matter what the vehicle is doing. If you are driving slowly and don't hit anything too dramatic, the camera will stay in its position.
Suddenly, we were getting these stabilized images where we could use a long telephoto lens to film. We could lock onto something as small as a tire from a hundred yards away and fill the frame with the shot of a tire while we were moving. When I saw that I realized that Aerial Camera Systems and I had made a big breakthrough—no one has ever been able to do that before for animal films. Aerial Camera Systems called it Yogi Cam after yogic flying, where people who meditate feel they can hover above the ground. The Yogi Cam gives you a sense of floating beside the animals.
PM: What does the Yogi Cam allow you to do that you couldn't have done before?
TO: In addition to being able to move with the animals and not disturb their behaviors, the Cineflex camera can capture anything from about 6 feet away to potentially half a mile way. When we were following a herd of migrating reindeer, we ended up driving through a river—it was scary because we had about $600,000 worth of equipment on the back! And in Kenya, we were able to follow a baby elephant on its first journey to water. It was a day-long, 6-mile trek, and we were able to stay with the same family the whole time because we didn't have to get out and get in position to film and maybe lose that herd. That would have been harder to do any other way.
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