Pacific Motion Control

Famous Footwear “Neighborhood” Commercial

Behind the Scenes

Time-Lapse Setup Video

Shot with the Zebra motion control camera dolly on location and on a stage in Vancouver, British Columbia. The camera was a Phantom Gold HD high-speed camera at 600 FPS. Behind the scenes footage was shot with a GoPro HD camera mounted to the Zebra.

Director – Loni Peristere of Zoic Studios
Motion Control Operator – Mike Leben
Motion Control Tech – Craig Shumard

Spec commercial for Ecko Unlimited featuring a ton of motion control by Pacific Motion. Multiple passes were filmed using the Gazelle motion control camera crane. For the first pass, an actor in a Chroma Green suit was filmed as he “painted” the man on the wall. In the second pass, another actor stood with his back to the wall, then “broke away”, wiped himself off, then walked away. A third pass of clean background plates was then shot. This was done over multiple setups, in an actual dirty parking lot and alley in downtown Los Angeles.

Director – Jack Wung
Motion Control Operator – Paul Maples
Motion Control Techs – Craig Shumard, David Mansour, Garritt Hampton
Gazelle motion control camera crane provided by Pacific Motion Control

Yoplait “Peach” Commercial

Produced by Imaginary Forces
Shot with the Gazelle motion control camera crane, outfitted with our Cheetah track drive motor and a Phantom HD high-speed camera.

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.