Cutting to the chase

GEORGE PETERS’ life revolves around speed. “I race off-road trucks,” he says. “I direct TV car commercials.”

It’s fitting, then, that the invention for which he and two partners received film industry recognition this year is a tool that makes it easier to film chase scenes.

With Lev Yevstratov and Vasily Orlov, Peters developed the Ultimate Arm Camera Crane System, which won a technical achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Feb. 18.

“A significant evolutionary improvement in camera car technology, this remotely controlled, gyro-stabilized and flexible camera crane offers a highly stable platform for high-speed, rough terrain action shots,” the academy’s citation reads. “Its ingenious applications of sophisticated technology solve many of the problems inherent in chase vehicle filming.”

In layman’s terms, says Peters, that means the system can film “stable imagines over any rough terrain .... It can go on any type of carrier -- car, boat and train. It can go on anything that moves.”

The crane, invented two years ago, has been used to film the chase sequences in “Taxi,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” and the upcoming “Miami Vice.”

In “Batman Begins,” it was mounted on a Mercedes SL55 tracking vehicle to capture the pulse-pounding 10-minute sequence in which police cars chase the Batmobile. As a stunt driver operated the Mercedes, Peters sat in the back seat controlling the crane via joysticks and watching the actions on monitors. In addition to the driver and Peters, the focus puller, camera operator and movie’s director of photography were also in the car.

It was a new era for the chase scene. Before the Ultimate Arm Camera Crane, directors didn’t have cameras that could travel at high speeds to film a moving vehicle. And previous cranes were rigid. “If the center jumped, the whole crane would jump,” says Peters.

The Ultimate Arm, he says, “is flexible in the middle so the back is separate from the front. It helps stabilize the image, so if the car jumps, the ends stay in the same spot and the middle goes up and down.”

It’s the first crane with that capability, says Peters. “We patented the technology.”

Weighing some 580 pounds, the crane is 18 feet long but can be expanded. “It has quick-change extensions that can take it out to 22 feet,” he says.

Peters started out in the movie industry at age 16 working alongside his older brother as a grip. “Being a grip you have to worry about camera motion,” he says. “I just felt camera motion was in the Stone Age. We needed to progress.”