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Spidercam Flys Back into Wembley for the Foo Fighters
The Rigging Partnership Ltd (TRP) was back at Wembley Stadium when the venue played host to the Foo Fighters for two nights. The Stadium was packed with over 80,000-strong crowds and support acts including Supergrass and members of Led Zeppelin performed as special guests with the band.
Having just got back from filming The Champions League in Moscow, Spidercam was brought in from TRP by Splinter Films, specialists in music and live events, to cover the massive concerts. Both nights' shows were filmed and the result was ready for cinema release at the end of the month, and will also be available for MSN broadcast and on Blu-ray DVD.
The stage design, which included a B-stage that wrapped round the front of house control position, was joined to the main open stage by a thrust walkway that ran almost the length of the pitch. This extensive performance area called for a different approach to filming and Spidercam provided full 360 degree coverage across the whole area of the pitch.
Spidercam is specifically aimed at the large scale arena and stadium market. The four-way flying camera system provides High Definition broadcast and film-quality camera feeds at speeds of up to 10m/sec. The stabilised head is supported by four winches capable of a staggering 350m of travel enabling the system to fly over areas of up to 250m².
The Spidercam system can be controlled by joysticks or pre-programmed with graphic visualisation enabling you to see the position of your flight path and camera on a separate monitor. The winches are kept extremely compact (1.5m x 0.9m x 0.7m) by mounting the gearbox and the motor inside the lightweight aluminium drums. Rather than using steel wire rope the system uses Kevlar rope with a polyester sheath. Two of these ropes have fibre optic cores, one to allow for control of the pan/tilt/focus/zoom/aperture of the stabilised remote head and the other to allow for live HD-SDI signal via fibre optic slip rings in the winch. Therefore there is no data loss and no wireless transmission is involved. The system has also been approved by TUV for BGV-C1 certification.
As Gavin Weatherall, director of The Rigging Partnership explained: "It is great to film sports events but we love nothing more than good old fashioned rock & roll in such an iconic venue. We have gone from Camel Racing to football to the Foo Fighters in one month - it is very exciting."
3rd July 2008
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