Some of the most memorable scenes in the Apple TV and Warner Bros. F1 movie are the various close-ups of Brad Pitt and Damson Idris gripping the wheels of their race cars as they blast down the straights. It looks effortless on screen, but shots like this that put you behind the wheel in a race car cockpit would have been impossible without the help of a custom-built camera system.
Hollywood looks to be increasingly using bespoke rigs and purpose-built camera gear to deliver unique, immersive visuals. Danny Boyle experimented by shooting parts of 28 Years Later on an iPhone. The filmmaker made a custom rig to hold 20 iPhones to create what he dubbed a “poor man’s bullet-time effect”, which is essentially when you see the camera pan across a subject in slow motion.
For F1, though, the challenges were far steeper, because the filmmakers needed a high-performance cinematic camera that did not (yet) exist. With cars pushing past 200mph during real-life Grand Prix races, the brutal G-forces and relentless vibrations inside race cars made conventional cinema cameras unusable, which is why the film’s cinematographer, Claudio Miranda, knew exactly who to call when he was given the assignment: Sony.
This wasn’t the first time Miranda and director Joseph Kosinski had faced this problem. Four years earlier, the pair had worked together on Top Gun: Maverick, a film that required them to capture similarly fast-paced scenes inside the cockpits of real F/A-18 Super Hornets, which led Sony to make a custom prototype that eventually became known as the Venice Extension System, aka the Rialto.
“The camera head [had to be] very small to fit in the airplane,” Sony’s head of cinema cameras, Nobutatsu Takahashi, told TechRadar. That compact design allowed for six Sony Venice cinema cameras to be squeezed inside the fighter jets, enabling the crew to capture the film’s now iconic aerial combat sequences.
But Formula 1 cars presented a new challenge – even the Rialto couldn’t fit in the cockpit. So, when Kosinski called again asking for a “sensor on a stick”, Sony engineered a new solution. In less than four months Takahashi and his team of engineers (they’d already started coming up with solutions live on the call), made a camera so tiny that it’s virtually just the sensor itself. That made it small enough to slip inside the tight confines of the modified F2 chassis that Pitt and Idris were racing in, while still delivering big-screen image quality.
“The first meeting was in January,” Takahashi said. “We showed two types of cameras to Claudio: one was shorter and one was thinner. Claudio wanted the camera to fit under the halo structure, [so he] wanted the shorter prototype. [It was this prototype that eventually became the] productized Venice Extension System Mini, which will be released soon.”
The second prototype that Claudio initially passed on ended up becoming the Rialto Mini, added Sony’s Tanya Lyon, who works on the cinema line team.
“Claudio needed to capture the driver’s emotions [while keeping the actors] safe,” Takahashi said. “So, the camera had to be much smaller than the original Rialto.” And because it was so small, they could mount the Rialto Mini on actors’ heads without affecting their performance or (even more) crucially their driving.
“The cameras also had to be very robust.” Indeed, while the most challenging part of the project was the camera size, mechanical engineers also spent a significant amount of time making sure that the cameras could withstand extreme speed and vibrations. “After using them on the F1 movie, [they] came back with damage from dust and sand, but they still worked perfectly,” Takahashi said.
“The prototype [also had a feature that allowed it to] remotely control every camera setup… using an iPad. [In one setup,] four cameras were in one car, and they were usually driving two cars, so eight cameras [were being] controlled remotely. [At one point,] they were using 20 cameras at the same time.”
Takahashi added that the team also developed a new ND (neutral density) system with interchangeable energy filters for different cinematic visuals. “Basically this camera has the picture quality of the FX6 and FX3, but at the same it has a remote feature derived from the FR7.”
Lyon revealed that even though it’s not yet out on the market, the Rialto Mini has already been used by “countless Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning cinematographers, including in a Steven Spielberg movie”. “Larry Sher, who did Joker, just used it,” she said, adding that it has been used in over 30 films and TV shows at the time of writing.
It’s not surprising that cinematographers are already using these bespoke cameras, especially when you consider that these are essentially one of a kind. Takahashi said he often gets requests through cinematographers, but that it’s rare to field requests for such urgent, highly specific hardware, electrical and software modifications as he did for F1. For instance, Takahashi’s team also developed a custom camera for James Cameron, but that only required hardware modifications to make a detachable camera head to capture 3D images for Avatar.
It’s these types of challenges that Takahashi and his team thrive on. At the end of the day, technology alone can’t create art, which is why he acknowledges that “working together with creators, filmmakers and cinematographers will make everything happen”.
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