WHO'S THIS?
I'm Giacomo and I'm the founder and coordinator of a Venice area-based filmmaking collective known as Hive Division.
We gathered around a feature-lenght, no budget fanfilm, Metal Gear Solild: Philanthropy, in order to put together our different skills, gain visibility and grow up as a team. The film was released in September 2009 and had a huge success of public, accumulating more than 3 millions overall views and represents the base of know-how on wich we're currently building our original narrative projects (the first one will be announced in September 2011) and our path in the video production business.
and here's a video we shot for an institutional client
Provincia di Treviso - Ti resta nel cuore 2010 from Hive Division on Vimeo.
Some time ago we met Roberto Navoni,Laser Navigation's CEO and coordinator of the VirtualRobotix Community in order to discuss a future Hive Division project (Wave) for a sci-fi feature that would require an agile camera platform, something beyond any available crane, steadycam or cablecam.
The multicopter frenzy at the time was still building its momentum, but it was clearly a cost-effective approach and, therefore, the best fit for our needs.
A series of meetings and brainstormings with Roberto, though, made clear that the end results we aimed at was not just to get a platform we could use for the feature film Wave, but a high performance flying camera that would suit any indie video production, virtually replacing the helicopter in most of the situation. The project than turned into a proper R&D cooperation between Hive and Laser, one that our lack of immagination forced us to call the "Wave Camera" :)
In Hive Division, the guys following this project are
- Me
- Alberto, Hive's 3d Team, graduated in aerospace engineer and future Wave pilot
- Mattia, Hive's DOP, graduated in multimedia technology ad future Wave camera operator
WAVE CAMERA
Thanks to the HDSLR revolution, many little companies around the world are currently working at such devices and some DID achieve remarkable results, but we always feel like something is missing (the incapacity of producing anything but wide angle shots, the lack of proper focus control etc).
We want to create a new one, built specifically for indie filmaking.
We want our platform to carry heavier equipment, better optics and to carry them faster and further than what existing platforms are currently able to do. We want our platform to be well integrated with its "eye" and to give filmakers-on-a-budget a flexible and powerful tool for their needs.
Instead of trying to create a Predator-sized UAV without any meaningful ROV experience, we decided for a step-by-step approach in order to softly land on any critical aspect of such a project.
The first two platform that Roberto and his company prepared for us are:
- A light, relatively cheap quadcopter that Alberto will use to perfect his ROV skills
- A medium-sized coaxial hexacopter that will be used to lift our HDSLR and to gradually prepare our wishlist of features for the long-term developement of our ultimate flying camera :)
We'll start testing both platform around the end of august/september, and we plan, together with Roberto, to keep you Virtualrobotix guys posted about our developements. Any suggestion or feedback you'll be willing to provide will help us shape this platform.
I hope you'll enjoy following our project :)
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