Visual Air makes the cover of AV Specialist

Tai Krige recently shot an interesting commercial using a completely new camera platform. As a car fanatic he'd often thought about experimenting with different camera platforms and he he shares the experience.
Tai Krige was at home, licking his wounds after two months spent directing Vodacom commercials in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was looking forward to some quality time with his family when the phone rang. "We need you now," said the voice on the other end of the phone, before proceeding to detail shooting dates and departure time from Johannesburg International Airport. "But that's tomorrow" he heard himself saying. "Yes, but you can sleep on the plane ... and it's not going to be a long shoot." came the reply. He was set to film two Ford GT40 replicas racing along Chapmans Peak Drive. Through the fog of half dreams he heard someone agree to the job. He's still not sure it was really him but he was on the plane to Cape Town the next morning. "What really thrilled me was the fact that we would not be filming these		gorgeous motor cars in the normal manner, but by mounting the camera onto a new, high speed, remote controlled jet helicopter. Bad memories sprung to mind Tai had tried working with remote helicopter systems early in his career and while it seemed like a great idea at the time, they just didn't crack it. " They were noisy, very unreliable and worst of all, they fell out of the sky a lot." he recalls. " I remember shooting with one such such system, which my late producer David Feldman had helped finance. We were filming a commercial in a large meadow covered in plastic flowers. Sheep were grazing around a Sealy Posturepedic bed complete with beautiful model feigning sleep. To everyone's horror, the chopper/camera-rig came crashing down - decapitating some of the flowers carefully planted by our art director hours		before." As he sat on the plane winging his way back to Cape Town he thought back on his past experience and wondered whether his enthusiasm for the project was misplaced. The Cape Town experience Being a total car freak and having directed a great many car commercials, Tai had often deliberated on how to get different shots in the can. " A big breakthrough was the advent of Ken Eddy's Giraffe crane, which enabled me to place and move the camera in unusual and cramped places," he says " but imagine ... fitting a camera to a small helicopter and chasing speeding sports cars down a mountain pass. The possibilities were boundless." In the mother city Tai was introduced to Stephen Verheul, managing director of Visual Air Productions and Sean Russell, the pilot of the remote helicopter. "With a

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