When VFX artist and motion control supervisor Allan O. Lückow and Oscar winning DP Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire) needed to create a handheld look while shooting Antichrist the new film by maverick director Lars von Trier they turned to OConnor’s new 120EXe encoding fluid head for visual effects. Lückow developed a three-axis live-action camera motion control shot to give the framing the handheld feel they wanted. The 120EXe was used for motion capture which was then replayed on the motion control system. “A third roll/dodge sensor sat on top of the OConnor head with hand bars in front ” Lückow says. “That way Anthony could hug the OConnor and point anywhere using his own body movement to give the shot a handheld feel. The OConnor’s precise settings and the stability of the head helped keep match moves to the other handheld shots.” The 120EXe has now become Lückow’s head of choice for heavy-duty effects work. For a recent data logging shot Lückow explains that he needed “extreme stability and high precision with regards to pivot points/nodal offsets. It was a heavy camera set up because we were using an Angenieu 24mm-290mm zoom so when Michael Geissler (from Mo-Sys) gave me the opportunity to use the 120EXe I immediately choose it as the main head knowing we’d get precise data for the camera position.” On a third occasion Lückow was charged with a green screen shot using Mo-Sys’ 3D inserter together with the 120EXe. “We had to change cameras when we shot high-speed frame rates and needed to put the camera in precise offsets because the nodal offset needed to be the same every time ” he says. “With the 120EXe I could interchange the cameras and balance them very easily and could quickly frame up and know I would have the correct offsets through the pipeline. “The 120EXe works very well for us. You don’t see this ease of use and very high precision even with a heavy camera and when placing it in tenths of millimeters and fraction of degrees with other heads. The sensors are extremely precise easy and stable. And Mo-Sys’ databus delivered the data to our 3Dinserter which pre-visualized and logged the data without any flaws or errors.” The OConnor 120EXe provides output pan and tilt position information via a 19-pin Fischer connector. Mo-Sys provides a companion encoder box that allows high-resolution pan and tilt data of 1.8 million counts per revolution making it suitable for film and HD formats. The 120EXe features built-in encoders rather than bolt-on assemblies of encoder hardware. It can support up to a 120 pounds (54 kilograms) camera package through the head’s entire tilt range of plus-or-minus 90 degrees and can counterbalance up to 240 pounds (109 kilograms) through a tilt range of plus-or-minus 60 degrees (payload weights based on an eight-inch center of gravity). “OConnor is the head of choice for most DPs in my region of the world ” Lückow says. “I like that from shoot to shoot you have the same feeling in the fluid drive even if you use different rental houses. For me when delivering live-action data logging and motion control it is extremely important that the operator feel as natural as possible. Using the OConnor 120EXe equipped with sensors gives us that and more.” OConnor www.ocon.com
