Pacific Motion Control

This commercial was filmed with the Gazelle Motion Control Crane and our Cheetah high-speed servo track drive system. Passes were filmed at multiple frame rates for a dramatic effect.

Behind the Scenes with the Gazelle

This video was shot with the Gazelle Motion Control Crane. Shots were operated live, then repeated. The video features good examples of “Twinning” and repeat passes with time effects such as forward and reverse motion in the same shot.

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.

Broken Bells “The Ghost Within” Music Video

The Gazelle motion control camera crane was recently tasked to do some classic motion control work for a very modern music video.  In films like Star Wars and Star Trek: The Motion Picture motion control was perfected while shooting miles of film of miniature space ships, and that technique was used very effectively in music video for “The Ghost Within”.

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.