AP trivia question

[heliplt]

Hey does any one know who came up with the idea of mounting a camera to an RC heli to take photographs?

I’m just curious about who was the first person that can up with the concept and does he hold a patent on the idea? :dontknow

[Nitrospazzz]

Not sure about a heli but aerial Photography was first practiced by a French photographer in 1858 shooting from a hot air ballon

[heliplt]

Thanks for the info Blake .

[Flyboy]

To the best of my knowledge it was most likely Emmanuel Prévinaire & http://flying-cam.com/

"FIRST IN FLIGHT
While remote-controlled helicopters are still gee-whiz novelties to many, they have been around since the early '90s, thanks primarily to the pioneering efforts of a company called Flying-Cam (Santa Monica, Calif.; www.flying-cam.com). While CopterVision began taking clients in 1999, Flying-Cam opened for business 10 years earlier in Belgium before opening a U.S office in 1994.

Founded by Emmanuel Previnaire, who first began developing designs for a remote-controlled helicopter in the 1980s as a student at the IAD Institute, a Belgian film school, the company is generally considered to be the leading production facility in this unique market. Today, Previnaire's company has a permanent staff of five people, a stable of eight helicopters, and two crews. Each crew consists of a camera operator, a pilot, and a technician.

Previnaire says most of the work in this field initially came from music videos. Since music videos tend to push the edges of creativity, he says, directors were drawn to the remote helicopters' freedom of movement and ability to get unique footage that hadn't been seen before. With a mini-helicopter, for example, you can have a singer twirling and dancing on the edge of a sheer cliff or in the middle of a desert as the camera does a dance of its own, twirling and spinning above and around them.

“When you invent something, the first thing people want to do is make something that will make the audience say, ‘Wow, how'd they do that,’” Previnaire says. “And that was how our system was first used — to create real movement without special effects.”

After the music videos came television commercials for cars, resorts, perfume, candy bars, and all sorts of things. Along with that came a growing interest in using the cameras for point-of-view (POV) shots — be it the point-of-view of a bird flying through the sky, a horse galloping across a field, a baseball being hit out of the ballpark, or a golf ball being driven down a fairway. In many cases, they were the kind of shots that couldn't be achieved any other way.

Next, the mini-helicopters were called upon to capture dynamic shots to add an intense visual thrill to a sequence, such as shots that called for the camera to go zipping through a grove of trees at high speeds or to zoom downward from the sky and pass through the window of a city building. Again, it's the kind of shot you simply could never get with a crane or a full-size helicopter. With that kind of ability, it wasn't long before Flying-Cam caught the attention of Hollywood.

In 1995, the company won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement, and today almost all of its work comes from the feature film world. While other remote helicopter production companies might be able to boast about a few feature film clients, Flying-Cam is clearly the leader in this respect. Most recently, its helicopters were used to capture the POV of a flying car for the next Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter II: The Chamber of Secrets."

[bladebreaker]

Hey FB,
You really know your stuff! Good info!
:noteworthy

Tip

[heliplt]

Thanks for the heads up, this is some very good info :noteworthy

[lowandslow]

I was flying R/C choppers back in the mid 80's when the Concept 30 was the chooper to have and a helicopter from TSK was considered high end. Don't kown about the others for sure but I know R/C helis like the Cricket have been around much longer than that, maybe since the 70's.

I know that since 1995 maybe longer there is a person in Southern California that has been doing AP with an R/C heli long before there were any AP forums in existance or even the discussion of AP with a helicopter. He may not be the first but he's been doing it full time longer than anyone I've known. He's been at it for at least 15 years that I know of. He’s not on any AP forums and doesn’t do any real advertising. In fact he was the one that got me into it.

I remember way back, when we were all still shooting with 35mm film cameras and the thought of shooting digital was laughable. In fact I may have been one of the first to start using a digital camera on a helicam. I remember when I was made fun of for using a digital as at the time they were considerd not much more than 1.2mp toys. To me, using the video out port through the downlink was a dream come true. If I think back, there were maybe 10 people total in the USA doing AP with R/C helicopters.