Rigging To A Military Jet

A director I work with wants me to research a documentary she's producing on jet dogfights.

Looking for someone who could act as a consultant or rigging coordinator for putting cameras on military aircraft.

Format will probably be super 16mm. Since my experience is with earthbound humanoids, I need some help.

Norman Bonney
DP
San Francisco

Norman Bonney writes :

>A director I work with wants me to research a documentary she's >producing on jet dogfights

The military has enormous experience rigging cameras in and on aircraft, as do the manufacturers of the individual aircraft.

You will need enormous clout to rig your own cameras in active military aircraft, if they let you do it at all. However, there are huge stocks of footage available.

You might want to get in touch with someone at the War, I mean History, Channel. They seem to have a direct line to the Pentagon.

Brian Heller
IA 600 DP

Norman,

I did a project for the Air force that involved cameras in jets.

We were shooting Beta and 16 mm. The Air force was pretty adamant about what could and could not go in the jets. There's not a lot of extra room and anything in there is subjected to high G forces. They finally agreed to put lipstick cameras and 8 mm decks in the planes and supervised the rigging themselves.

Your military ‘liaison’ person would be the best place to go for info.

Marty Mullin
DP
Los Angeles

>Looking for someone who could act as a consultant or rigging >coordinator for putting cameras on military aircraft.

Norman

I have spent more than eight weeks rigging and then flying with cameras inside F5 & F5b supersonic aerobatic fighters on location in Turkey with the Turkish Stars - one of only six supersonic aerobatic teams in the world.

A lot of what I was doing in-cockpit was in G forces that exceeded 5-6G and they trained me up to 8.9G (almost killed me as you can imagine!)

Regards

Laurie "Nure" Gilbert s.o.c.
Legendary Turkish Aviator
Motion Picture Director of Photography
HD Cinematographer

SOC : www.soc.org
Los Angeles : www.aerialcinematography.com

...or copy the grip and rigging credits from "Top Gun," spend a few hours calling around and you will probably get the very best information for a big $$$$ production and you can scale back to suit your own budget.

Jerry Cotts
DP/LA