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MillimeterNew Stock
Apr 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
Artbeats used a Learjet with a Sony HDW-F900 mounted in the nose to capture aerial footage.
Artbeats
Artbeats, founded in 1989, is a boutique stock house offering royalty-free footage with unlimited use and licensed for broadcast worldwide at very affordable prices. The company also is producing unique shoots guaranteed to be one of a kind.
“We've done two major shoots this year [2007],” says Artbeats CEO and Creative Director Phil Bates. “One of them was involving a Learjet with Wolfe Air. They're a contractor we use for doing aerial footage. They have a Learjet that's specially equipped with a bottom port that allows them to shoot side-to-side air-to-air footage, as well as a nose-camera mount so that we can shoot POV footage. The purpose of this shoot was actually to shoot flying through clouds, because that happens to be a very good seller of ours. We didn't have any high-def version of that. But while we were up there, I figured maybe we should go ahead and find a business jet to shoot at the same time, because nobody else has that really. We love to do things that nobody else has. I get jazzed about doing stuff like that because that's really our business model: to provide things that are difficult or expensive to shoot. So we found we could get a business jet, and there was somebody else at Van Nuys Airport [the base for the film shoot] that had an F5 fighter jet. I thought, ‘Well, in for a penny, in for a pound; why don't we go ahead and take that up for an hour or two and shoot that as well as the business jet.’”
Artbeats' next big investment turned into a 13-day aerial shoot across the country by helicopter. Bates had gotten requests for aerials of Dallas and Miami. When he looked at the fees for ferrying all his equipment over, it seemed more worthwhile to fly there and film along the way. Again, they turned to Wolfe Air.
“The mount that they used on the helicopter — they have developed a gyro-stabilized gimbal called ‘Gyron,’ which is very smooth,” Bates says. “It gets rid of all the vibrations and bumps and jitters and things like that, so we get ultra-smooth footage from that.”
Artbeats shoots with Sony HDW-F900 cameras, then the footage is converted to digital files — which are delivered to clients as QuickTime files.
