Shooting skydiving on film—true film—has a long history. Nearly at our sport’s inception, freefall cinematographers captured it this way. It was the only way to show a skydive in motion. Many of the early movie cameras used in freefall were World War II military surplus, just like early parachute gear. These were gun cameras, which the military mounted on aircraft guns to record a minute or so of footage when the weapon fired.
The footage from film cameras was not available for viewing immediately. It had to be developed. Competition teams such as the legendary Mirror Image had to wait a week to view their practice jumps; there was no video debrief! However, this also made watching skydiving film an event, a reason to get together. In California, jumpers would gather at the Rumbleseat Bar to watch footage from the previous week’s jumps.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the pioneers and mentors that passed the art of shooting on film down to me. Ray Cottingham, Rande DeLuca, Carl Boenish and Kevin Donnelly freely shared their art, like a parent teaching a child to walk. Although shooting on film had many pitfalls and ways to disappoint, for those of us who shot on it, it is sad to see its passing. We built our own batteries and remote switches and set everything manually. Over the years, film systems improved, but it all ended up on celluloid. We had to perform so many steps perfectly that when we got amazing footage, the taste was just that much sweeter. There’s also a look and feel to film that is different, perhaps like the sound of vinyl records. The quality of movie film was so good that properly stored, decades-old film can be transferred to digital and meet current standards.
The last time I shot movie on film was in 2005 for a movie called “Stealth.” Since then, all my high-end projects have been shot in professional video formats. Easier, smaller, lighter: yes. But less rewarding as a cinematographer. When I shot “Stealth,” I had a sneaking suspicion that it might be the last time I would have my hands in a film changing bag, get everything right, click the mag to the camera, bump a few frames of celluloid to check that everything was running smoothly and shoot a slate showing the information about the jump and the camera settings.
It turned out I was wrong: Nearly 13 years later, I received a call to shoot on real film again. One of the main reasons I was intrigued to work for the writer and director Kaveh Nabatian on his independently produced film “The Seven Last Words" with Microclimat films was the opportunity to use this format. Nabatian wanted to shoot on film with very high-speed frame rates for a dream-like sequence, so we decided on a Photosonics 1VN camera, which was the model I used for shooting most of my film “Over the Edge” years ago. Although they use film, these cameras can reliably shoot up to 200 frames per second and are a far cry from the primitive military N6 gun cameras that had 50-foot cartridges (that shot one minute of film at normal speed) that our pioneers strapped onto their helmets.
After accepting the job, I called upon fellow skydiver Brent Finley, who is admittedly a camera nerd, to help. He is a wizard with movie cameras and has an entire room filled with 16mm, super 16mm and 35mm equipment. He tested all the cameras we’d use—every body, every film magazine, every lens— and re-celled all the batteries for the job. When shooting film, too much is at stake for a technical problem in the field. Meticulous preparation is just part of the culture.
Soon, I was off to Haiti, the location for the production, with my wife, Denise (who was hired to perform the skydiving stunts). It gives me goose bumps just reliving those few days in Haiti: skydiving, for one; shooting movie film, for two; and getting to work on a challenging job with my wife as the on-camera talent, for three. She also packed our parachutes and was the assistant cameraman: loading the film, downloading the film and dealing with my helmet system.
The skydiving scene we shot was a dream-like sequence in which the parachute was not supposed to be visible. This posed challenges, since independent films don’t have large budgets and hidden parachute systems are very expensive. We came up with a good solution: using a white rig that would blend in with the character’s billowing white wardrobe. I recalled an all-white show rig built by Sun Path that I had used in other projects. It had not been jumped in decades, but Sun Path fully inspected it, replaced the reserve pilot chute, packed a reserve into the empty container, added a CYPRES and shipped it to Denise. She added her main parachute.
I shot seven jumps on high-speed film for the scene. The improvised solution to hide the rig worked! At many angles, the billowing wardrobe blocked the view of the container; at other angles, the angle of the sun hid the rig. In shots where the rig was visible, post-production staff will remove it using the magic of computer graphics.
For the jumps, I used a blend of old and new systems—the Photosonics 1VN movie-film camera, a modern GoPro (so I could immediately show the director and others what the film camera had captured) and a Sony RX0 still camera, which produces stills of a very respectable quality despite its tiny size. Since there was no camera step or handles on the aircraft we were using and I needed to use both my hands to avoid getting blown off, I mounted the on-off switch for the movie camera on my helmet, and Denise triggered it during her exit count. I fired my stills with a custom bite switch built by skydiver Mark Kirschenbaum, owner of Hypoxic.
After my work was done, I had a chance to look at the dailies, and they were perfect. It was a nice way to end my career of shooting on film (if this is indeed my last opportunity).
Tom Sanders | D-6503
Haleiwa, Hawaii