Unfortunately, no Lama was available in Norway at that time, so it was necessary to put the bureaucratic machine in gear and obtain Norwegian permission to import one from England for the shoot. In addition Norwegian military permission had to be obtained in order to film and this almost became our undoing. We will always feel indebted to Ole Jacobsen, Flight Director of Helitourist, for sitting in offices for a number of days negotiating delicately with military officialdom in order to obtain the first aerial filming permission granted by Norway to a foreign registered aircraft, flown by a foreign pilot and carrying a foreign cameraman and assistant. This problem is particularly difficult for North Americans and the British to understand, but it arises frequently in Europe and is something that we have learned to cope with, although in this instance it threatened seriously up to the last moment the entire aerial section of the film.
A suitable shelter for the helicopter would have to be erected at Finse and for this a tent-type structure was assembled with electricity provided for heating both the helicopter and the camera system during the evenings.
Next came the substantial problem of installing a VistaVision camera in a Wesscam mount. We had selected the lightweight "Paramount" version without look-through and based on the "butterfly" magazine arrangement which involves a horizontal magazine positioned across the back of the camera and resembling the wings of a butterfly. This setup made the loaded camera much wider than it was long. (Approx. 2.5 feet with 1000-foot magazine.) This was an impossible size for us to deal with, so we set about designing and manufacturing an adapter channel that would guide the film from and to a Cinema Products 1000-foot XR-35 magazine mounted lengthwise and centered behind the camera body.
With some slight temporary changes within the camera body, this arrangement worked out quite well. The "lower" surfaces inside the CP mags were lined with the low stickion paper found between double-sided tape coming in rolls (this had the lowest friction coefficient of a number of materials tested), to permit the 1000-foot rolls to turn easily on their sides. In addition, the standard drag brakes on the feed side of the mags were removed, as the weight of the film roll against the lower surface provided sufficient impedance for the roll to stop reasonably quickly when the camera was switched off. Initially, the spring-type take-up belt was extended through ball-bearing rollers to provide take-up, but this was later eliminated and a small separate torque motor was installed to handle this task.
A rigid frame was made up to hold the camera and magazine arrangement. A servo drive for the Nikkor lenses' iris settings was installed, as well as a Sony model 1450 TV camera with 6mm lens to provide viewfinding on the TV monitor located inside the helicopter on the control console. On this monitor three different "boxes" were marked out corresponding to the field of view for the three Nikkor lenses we anticipated using: the 28mm, 35mm, and 50mm. Parallax problems were nonexistent for us, due to the infinity distances and the short focal lengths used.
It was necessary to compensate for the weight shift of film as it moved from the feed to the take-up end of the mag, so the normal footage counter that was mounted on the camera door was removed and a speed reducer gearbox installed in its place that was driven from the constant speed film drive sprocket inside the body. This was connected through a flexible shaft to a weight on a feed screw inside a tube guide that would be driven forward as the film moved rearwards in the magazine.
The resulting assembly was positioned on a joint that allowed the whole thing to tilt from 30 degrees above to 90 degrees below horizontal. It was especially important to maintain a short distance between the window opening in the "dome" of the system and the camera to allow the 28mm lens a clear unobstructed view.
The standard 28-volt DC camera motor presented some problems in that it was not designed to run the camera at the slow speeds (6 fps or less) that we wanted to utilize. The lowest acceptable speed that we could obtain was 10 fps. This entire motor setup was rather primitive, with a simple rheostat speed control, but because of time considerations, we couldn't set out to replace it with a new motor and control circuit as we have done since. Instead, the governor plate was removed and a small brass flywheel installed. A new rheostat control box was made up with a course and fine control rheostat. These changes allowed the camera to run smoothly with film down to two fps.
[ continued on page 3 ]