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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

COPTER—Coptervision Goes Where No Camera Has Gone Before

When Warner Bros. releases “Collateral Damage,” a film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, later this summer, viewers will glimpse people falling through an elevator shaft as if they were taking the fall themselves. Hair-raising special effects are nothing new to the film industry, but thanks to a new camera system developed by a Van Nuys company, the way the audience sees some of these effects will be all the more intimate. Four-year-old Coptervision made its mark with a remote controlled mini-helicopter fitted with a camera for close-range aerial photography. The Coptervision system can film from under bridges and inside tunnels at angles that traditional systems cannot. The company’s most recent invention, Rollvision, goes several steps further. Weighing just 15 pounds and able to roll or pan a full 360 degrees, or tilt 180 degrees, the camera can be set up on anything from a bicycle to a Steadicam, allowing it to fit into almost any space and to film action from points of view that previously took many hours to set up if it could be filmed at all. “The idea of a camera head that can pan and tilt and roll is not brand new,” said Mark Centkowski, president of Innovision Optics Inc., a Santa Monica-based firm that makes, sells and rents specialized production equipment for film and television and is helping Coptervision to market Rollvision. “What Coptervision has done has been, they’ve taken that idea and made it very lightweight and portable, and that’s the uniqueness.” Sarita Spiwak, co-founder, president and chief executive officer of Coptervision, spent years helping her physician husband build his medical practice. When the practice was sold, Spiwak began looking for a new venture. By chance, she met up with Carlos Hoyos, a photographer and film director who, for years, tinkered with remote-controlled camera equipment in his garage, and the two Colombian & #233;migr & #233;s formed Coptervision with Hoyos as vice president for research and development. Shortly afterward, Spiwak’s daughter, Daniela Meltzer, joined as vice president and chief operating officer. Within a year, Coptervision launched its first product, a remote-controlled helicopter that the company rented, along with a crew, to production companies. Coptervision has been used in filming for live sports coverage, films and music videos and on TV series such as WB Network’s “Charmed.” The executives won’t divulge sales revenues, but they say Coptervision has grown by about 30 percent each year since its launch in 1997. The trouble is that the system requires a specially trained crew to pilot the helicopter, work the camera equipment and manage the microwave transmissions that power it, and that has limited growth prospects. So when the industry began to show interest in using the company’s lightweight camera heads separately from the helicopters, Hoyos created the newest product. “We noticed a lot of people expressed interest in the camera design itself because you could detach it,” said Meltzer. “The idea for Rollvision started with that. We took it off the helicopter and put it on different platforms, Steadicams, tracking and rail systems.” Rollvision was mounted on the race cars in “Driven,” a feature film about Formula One races starring Sylvester Stallone. “You really felt like you were in the car,” said Spiwak. For “Collateral Damage,” it was attached to a cable that traveled down an elevator shaft. And in “The Scorpion King,” an upcoming sequel to “The Mummy Returns,” it was used to film an action shot that shows wrestling superstar The Rock hurtling down a two-mile drop from a mountaintop. “You felt you were flying with The Rock,” said Spiwak, who was on location to watch the filming. The company has even had inquiries from the military, but executives said they are wary of putting in the additional research and development needed to meet its requirements. Instead, Coptervision hopes to establish a distribution system for Rollvision that will expand the company’s reach both nationally and internationally. “It’s going to add a lot,” said Spiwak of Rollvision. “With sales and rentals and the interest out there, it’s going to put the company at a different level.”

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