The producers of Game of Thrones commissioned the Liege-based company Flying-Cam for one of its scenes, "The Loot Train", which required very high speed aerial shots. Having already won 2 technical and scientific Oscars, Flying Cam is specialised in unmanned aerial photography.
"The real challenge, and that's what led the producers of Game of Thrones to use Flying-Cam, was to provide a subjective shot of the Dragon in flight at ground level at a speed of over 100 km/hour", explains Thomas Wilski on the Motion Tribe blog. Thomas Wilski, who graduated from the IAD, was in charge of the technical preparation of the camera (Red Dragon) on the gyrostabilized head of SARAH, the latest model from Flying-Cam, which looks like a small helicopter.
"The aim was to give the images a real impact without cheating in post-production with virtual speeding-up, and to translate the impressive size of the Dragon into an image on a human scale (equivalent to an F-16!). Since most of the drones on the market (DJI, Freefly, etc.) are unable to do this, Flying-Cam developed an extremely powerful machine capable of reproducing the movements created in pre-production by the VFX team (via an animated storyboard), almost like a MotionControl, based on GPS data and very precise angles", he explains.
Founded in 1987 by Emmanuel Prévinaire, who was a pioneer in the field of proximity aerial photography, well before the arrival of drones on the market, the Flying-Cam teams are used to Hollywood sets: Harry Potter, Mission Impossible, the opening scene of Skyfall, the blowing up of a building for Transformers 4, the shot at the end of the film Oblivion with Tom Cruise, etc.
Flying-Cam is currently diversifying into solutions for VFX and is developing its own 3D mapping software.
