Pacific Motion Control

Pioneer Corn – 2008

This Pioneer Corn commercial used motion control to seamlessly marry live-action and CGI.

Computer Animation is used to show the high-tech side of pioneer corn. These effects are married to a single live-action shot, featuring a slow sweeping camera move. Motion Control move data was provided to the post house to and imported in to MAYA to model the camera move in the virtual realm.

Kuper motion control software is able to export motion control data as an ASCII data file, which can easily be imported into MAYA and other 3D modeling and CG programs.

This commercial is a great example of how motion control photography can be used to seamlessly add CGI elements to live-action while incorporating precision camera movement.

On the set of a recent Tsubaki commercial, I had the opportunity to capture a few hundred pictures of the Gazelle Motion Control Camera Crane in action, in order to put together a couple of really good 3D photo sets on Microsoft’s Photosynth website. For someone unfamiliar with motion control equipment, this is a good opportunity to see what a motion control camera crane looks like, set up and ready to go.

For this shot, we were on a very long track run, and the rig needed to go about 13 feet per second, so we were using our large servo track motor, and a 5/1 gear ratio for the track drive. we also needed to pan very quickly, so we fitted our motion control pan/tilt head with a servo motor for pan, and a large servo amplifier rode on the rig.

At the time of this shoot, this was as fast as we could possibly make the Gazelle go, and it performed flawlessly. Since this time, we built a much faster track drive system. Originally built for the Cheetah dolly, this track drive system can be used on all of our rigs, giving them the fastest tracking speeds of any full motion control systems.