ACS - and the art of cloud-flirting...

Buc today welcomes GE Healthcare (1,770 employees) , VLS ... – and ACS France ! Just 29km from Notre Dame (the so-called centre of Paris), our area of 600m2 can accommodate camera crews not just for testing equipment, but for experimenting with equipment on our systems. Enjoying a ceiling height of seven meters, the space also gives us the opportunity to mount a Cablecam system for demonstrations and tests over real distances.
Since its inception, ACS France has offered a high-quality service – if you need aerial filming, we will do our best to advise you on how to realise your vision. We work constantly to rethink our business and provide a better and better service to directors and cinematographers. In spite of the famous European ’crisis’, we have struck out and invested in new and exciting equipment to enable us to offer the very best.

We utilised our new building to prep equipment for a unique shot for a recent American film project. Our client needed an end-credit sequence of three minutes duration that required a camera to pass between actors at eye-level and then to fly away from them up to the clouds – all in one take.
This flirting with the clouds was enabled by using a stabilized rig comprising a Super-G head on a ’skate’ reinforced with mechanical gyros that kept the assembly under control. The work was even more special for us as it involved using a film camera (Arricam) which with the limitations of a 400’ load made discipline as tight as the old days.

We have also recently looked towards the future with the installation and successful testing of the Sony F55 camera with an Angenieux 28-340mm lens in our new Shotover K1. The K1 has six axes of stabilisation and thus gives the operator full movement and control in the vertical axis – we are no longer at the mercy of ’gyro-lock’ and inadvertent input by a pilot from the pedals. The F55/K1 combo was used in a three-week shoot in the South-Pacific and we look forward to seeing the results, which will set the benchmark in 4K production, on French TV soon.

Do not hesitate to visit the ACS France website – and please sign up to track the performance of our teams on Twitter and Facebook.Thank you all for this renewed confidence of 16 years. Here’s to many more years of beautiful and great technical adventures...