For the past year and a half, Curt Morgan and his adventure-seeking production house Brain Farm, have been working closely with the makers of the Cineflex cameras, an advanced set of 35mm digital cameras that are capable of capturing high image quality with the highest level of stability in even the most rugged conditions.
They’ve been using the cameras on helicopters, boats, trucks and any other kind of vehicle they can get their hands on, but recently, Brain Farm teamed up with Snaproll Media and Schiebel to get some unmanned helicopters equipped with the Cineflex.
The Creators Project caught up with Morgan briefly over the phone recently to find out more about these crazy new Cineflex-equipped drones and what else he’s got up his sleeve. He leaked a few precious details about an upcoming surfing film he’s about to begin filming and a Cineflex jet ski they’ve got in development. The future of filmmaking never looked so good.
The Creators Project: Tell me a little bit more of this drone camera situation that you guys went to Vienna for.
Curt Morgan: So let me tell you in a different order. So you know we are super into stabilized cinematography and finding ways to change the game in the cinematography market. That’s something we are adamant about, always finding a way to kind of outdo ourselves. So we got the Cineflex camera system from General Dynamics—the Cineflex v14 HD. It’s really cool but for what I was doing, it worked really well but wasn’t really built for me, it was more built for news. So I went to them about a year ago and I was like, “Can we work together to create the new system?” It took a little while, but eventually they came back and said, “We want a filmmaker involved in this, let’s do this. What do you wanna do?”
I basically worked with them for the last year and a half and we went through every single thing that was wrong with the current system—or, not wrong, but could be better—and changed up the camera to an ARRI ALEXA, which is a more cinematic digital super 35mm camera that shoots 120 frames per second. It’s super easy to produce, it’s a new computer system with a Canon layout on it that is fully wireless. Its all kind of geeky but it’s going to completely change the game as far as images are concerned, so we developed the system and launched it yesterday.
And so with the drone, we partnered with this company called Snaproll and they have a bunch of these smaller Heli systems that can fly and see red and all these other things. They had a relationship with a company called Schiebel in Austria and Schiebel was like, “We wanted to do this for so long, we want to integrate Cineflex. We’ve been talking about it for years,” and it was done.
Essentially, we worked with them for months to integrate the Cineflex into their system. We spent tons and tons of time on the phone coming up with different ways to make it work. All of our engineers put their heads together and figured out how to integrate Cineflex. We spent a week over there, we were figuring out how to build [the camera] into it, control it wirelessly, integrate the wireless controls into their current system and then transmit that back down to the ground. It was a big challenge and you’re flying 130lbs on an 8-foot unmanned aircraft—it’s not like it isn’t a big thing to pull off or anything—but it worked and it was trippy. That’s the meat of the story.
What does this mean for you as a filmmaker what will this allow you to do that you haven’t been able to do before? One time I was down in Molokai in Hawaii and I was shooting on this waterfall and it went off a huge overhanging cliff. I wanted the helicopter pilot so badly to fly me behind it—he probably could have, there was a 30 foot space behind it—but he was like, “absolutely not.” So I’m [thinking], “We’re never going to be able to do that. This is the one thing well never be able to do, fly around a waterfall, because its too dangerous for a helicopter.” But with a system like this, you can actually fly behind a waterfall, you can fly through a hotel lobby outside and reveal a city. You can turn a dolly, into a crane, into a helicopter, all in the same shot, so you can just accomplish more dynamic cinematography. It’s in its very beginning stages but it’s very exciting to see it working.
I was watching a video of the controllers you use to control these drones and it looks like you’re playing the most epic realistic video game ever. What was that like? [Laughs] We weren’t allowed to fly it. That specific system is crazy! It’s a military drone and Schiebel is getting it into the production world and we are helping them integrate it with Snaproll. It’s absolutely just crazy to see a multi-million dollar hunk of metal, or carbon fiber and aluminum, take off the ground and fly. It’s like, “Are you gonna come back? Please come back.” It’s kind of weird. It is the ultimate video game experience, for sure.
How does it feel for you as a filmmaker to be participating in creating new technology? My root is definitely in filmmaking—actually, originally photography and then I got into filmmaking—and I still really am, but I kind of almost got bigger goals than that. Being in the forefront of creating this groundbreaking technology. For me, there’s more excitement in that than making the film itself. But lately I’ve spent the last year focusing more on this new technology and this is just the beginning. I have a lot more ideas. I’m actually toying with the idea of opening a Brain Farm film school. I’ve never actually told anyone that, but in the next couple of years I want to open that up in Jackson and have a filmmaker’s kind of retreat for the real world people who want to make a difference in the world of film and television. Those are just some of my aspirations.
Wow, that would be amazing. So what kind of stuff are you shooting now with these new toys you’ve been working on? We’re doing a surf film right now, were doing another snowboard film, a skate film. We’e hiring more directors into the company and making it a bit more of a collaborative house, like really what the name originally meant—Brain Farm, bringing different smart creative people together to create cool stuff. I was thinking about it and realized that if I’m the only director in this thing, it will never grow, so we started hiring on some really creative amazing people to help tackle projects and put our stamp on it and it’s working out really well.
That sounds awesome. What more can you tell me about these films that you just mentioned? I have to keep that very vague. I can tell you that we’re doing sort of The Art of Flight of surfing, a very high-end film, but I can’t tell you any of the partners or anything like that. For that project we are going to be toying around with some crazy technology. We’re building a wireless Cineflex Jet Ski system that is absolutely the coolest thing you’ve ever seen. It’s gonna change everything for surfing. Were going to be using the drones for that film as well, so that gives you a little bit of a taste for what the movie might be. That’s gonna be a fun project. That project starts shooting the end of May in Indonesia. I cant give you too much of the film but it’s got lots of unique, remote locations in Africa, Indonesia, Alaska.
Source: The Creators Project