The Milo Motion Control System

The Milo Motion Control System is probably the most well known and reliable of the motion control systems. The particular one we are using spends most of the year in Cape Town and some of the year in London. But for this commercial we have had to bring the system up to Johannesburg.

The Milo is a large beast of a machine that reminds me of a robot used in the manufacture of cars and in essence that's what the Milo is. In a nut shell the Milo is a system that can do a camera move and then repeat that move time and time again. It can even be programmed to repeat the exact same move for different camera frame rates (i.e. if your master shot is done at 24fps then is can do a pass at 12fps and then it will do exactly the same camera move but in half the time, so when you blend the two takes together they blend seamlessly - very clever!)

To learn more about Motion Control click here

One of the issues using Motion Control is that its a laborious task that can often take a lot of time so we decided to spend a rehearsal day finding our shots with the motion control. There were three shots that we planned on getting and we had two days to shoot them - quite a luxurious schedule except that we had a whole heap of other work we were going to try to achieve over and above the motion control work and we could not afford to let the motion control work bog down the rest of the shoot.

Having the rehearsal day proved to be invaluable and I'm now convinced that if we didn't do this we would not have completed our schedule.

Some notes:

1. The Motion Control comes on a large truck so if your large truck cannot get to where you need the motion control to be then count on possibly needing to disassemble the whole rig and carry it to where you need it; this will require a lot of man power and time. Little things like steps and 1 foot high walls can become a major issue.

2. Having a good operator can save hours of time. Essentially the Milo is a five axis system (Pan, Tilt, boom, telescope and track) so you need someone who can really utilize the true scope that this machine has or there is a chance that things can get just too complicated.

3. Because of the many different passes often required when working with motion control I find it best to design the shot with the main action pass - some DOP's and Directors can get too bogged down with the BG passes and often this stuff is hardly seen especially once everything is comped together, also some moves may work well with the background but then once live actors are introduced they cannot keep up with the camera.

Here's our Milo under a highway near Newtown in Johannesburg