Location: Chamonix, France

What I learnt from the shoot: It’s always worth going the extra mile, literally.

This shoot was all about the eyesight of an Eagle, in the clip this eagle finds it’s trainer from 840 meters up the top of the Burj Khalifa, and my cameraman Mark and I were sent to Chamonix in France to meet the trainer, and see his eagles in action.

After the last shoot (see: Speedflying into a cable car), we were fortunately filming in the same location the next day, and the weather was playing ball, bright sunshine from the moment we woke up. Mark and I met Jaques, the eagle trainer at the halfway point up the mountain, after travelling up in the cable car.

I’m always tempted to try and capture the journey of a cable car, filming the spectacular views, or attaching a GoPro to the outside. And invariably I reach the same conclusion… it’s not worth it. In the edit I’ve always found we use very little of the journey to the location (unless it’s directly relevant to the story). Also, as a rule, gondolas/ cable car windows are usually scratched to the point you wouldn’t recognise your own mother on the other side of them anyway. Plus, rigging a GoPro on the outside is a very risky business as you don’t know what the arrival point is like and how close the carriage will get to the sides. I decided to enjoy the views, and think about the shoot ahead.

We setup for the interview with some spectacular scenery behind Jaques. Although, the brilliant white snow on top of the mountains was burning out slightly when exposing correctly for the light on Jaques face, fortunately Mark had a reflector, and this proved invaluable. Bouncing a little light on Jaques face perfectly balanced the exposure and gave us an evenly lit, and impressive interview setting. We were fortunate enough to find a friendly radio journalist who was there to interview Jaques as well that was willing to hold the reflector for us, interviewing someone while holding one isn’t the most relaxing/engaging environment to get good answers…

“Tell me how rewarding this experience was as I blind you with sunlight”

After the interview we trekked to a point on the side of the mountain where the eagle would be released by another handler, we would then pickup the shot of the eagle arriving with Jaques at the bottom later. While there, I setup a GoPro camera a bit further up to capture a time-lapse of the beautiful vista:

To make sure I was able to capture the full view, I used a kitchen timer which I’d bought on another trip and modified to have a GoPro mount fixed on top of it. The timer took 1 hour to do a full 360, so I set it to half an hour, which would give me a 180 of the view. Knowing this, I set the time-lapse speed to one picture every two seconds, which, when compiled at twenty five frames per second gives one second of footage for every 50, or 36 seconds for every half hour, just about right for the 30 minutes it would take to turn 180 degrees. Better to create a longer shot which they can speed up in the edit than a shorter one which can’t be slowed down. I’ve done a fair few of these before and have learnt that the best rotating time-lapse (or ‘rotalapses’… maybe) have something very near in the foreground, in this case the rock at the end. The reason for this is the GoPro has a slight fisheye effect which distorts the edge of frame and is particularly noticeable when objects are near the camera, which is a cool effect, plus it gives a good sense of depth in the image.

But back to the eagle, we were setting up to film the eagle departing the mountain to meet it’s trainer further down. Ever heard the phrase ‘never work with animals or children’, this is why… The eagle refused to fly. Mark had setup the camera for the departure on some level ground, but the eagle wasn’t able to spot Jaques at the bottom for the command to fly, and so was not moving. The handler suggested moving further down the mountain, so Mark switched to the 70-200mm long lens to follow him on the camera and stay where he was, while I walked with the trainer down the mountain. Unfortunately the eagle was feeling particularly docile and I must have walked about a kilometre down the mountain before it caught sight of Jaques and was ready to fly, by this point Mark had lost the shot. But fortunately I was able to film it in slow motion on the iPhone 6.

It’s always worth going the extra mile, literally.

The resolution is by no means perfect, it was shot in 720p at 240fps, which allows us to slow down the footage about ten times. Slow motion like this only really works with an abundance of light because of the high frame rate, so bright sunshine was perfect. The shot made the edit and was TX’d, which is a great reward for going the extra mile, and let me tell you, it felt like a mile, I realised this when i was walking back up the mountain to meet Mark - unexpected mountain treks were now obviously familiar territory.

The thing I took away from this experience was that it’s always worth following the action to be there, even if you have to sacrifice quality of shot, in this case an iPhone instead of a Canon C300. Better to see the thing happen and film it in lower quality, than miss it entirely.