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MillimeterHow to Film a Fall
Oct 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
Aaron Rhodes admits he stepped a bit out of his role as documentarian while making his short film, Falling, but he claims it was for a good cause. Rhodes shot over 40 hours of film and video images chronicling filmmaker Rolf Gibbs' unique mission: to depict the POV of an entity free-falling 30,000 feet from an airplane. Gibbs intended the free-fall to be the entire subject of his own short film, G. Eventually, Rhodes got involved in aiding Gibbs' quest.
After several attempts to drop video cameras and Milliken military, 16mm film cameras over a cattle ranch in Davis, California, Gibbs' team failed to get clean footage of the entire descent. None of the cameras were able to withstand the fall, even when encased in a specially designed, metal "bomb" housing. In some cases, the cameras were smashed to bits, and in the film-camera tests, the film itself ended up sliced to pieces.
Then Rhodes suggested that Gibbs try packing "a dual-video camera system" into the bomb. "The idea was to use two digital, Sony PC1 cameras - Sony's mini-DV format - linked together," explains Rhodes. "One camera was located in the nose of the bomb - the PAL version of the PC1 - pointing downward. We used a cable Firewire system to connect it to a second PC1 camera in the back, the NTSC version of the camera, which we rigged to record the first camera's PAL signal. The camera in the back was positioned on its side so that its heads would not pull away from the tape in the collision, while it recorded the same picture as the front camera."
The system worked, and Gibbs finally obtained a single four-minute shot from air-drop through collision. The footage was color-corrected and transferred to 35mm film at The Orphanage, the San Francisco-based production company where Rhodes works. Gibbs film, G, went on to win an Honorable Mention in the Sundance shorts program, while Rhodes' documentary debuted at the Slamdance and Digidance festivals.
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