Sunday, October 21, 2007
The Magic of Wat Chai Watthanaram
The next afternoon we arrived with our Tuc-Tuc, cameras, transmitter case and heli in a special carrier bag; the latter one works great, by the way. We walked up to the booth to buy our entry tickets – and it's all big eyes! "Gaa-gaa-waa-aaa-agaahaa?!" – "It's the toy model helicopter, we talked about it yesterday, all is fine!" – "Waa-aagaa-na-aahaag!" You don't have to speak Thai to realize something is just about to go terribly wrong. Our Tuc-Tuc driver happened to at least understand basic English, and after lengthy discussions we found out that the heli was NOT the problem – but the transmitter! In such cases where communication is a pain it's very important to stay extra calm and to be exceptionally friendly; else the discussion will heat up, because the employees only want to do their job, and it's equally hard for them to cope with the situation.
Okay, nobody there had ever seen a somewhat advanced transmitter before, and it looked frightening to them. So we played the mime game to show them how the flying would work. After a while, the ice was broken, and we were allowed to take both the heli and transmitter onto this ancient site.
STOP! STOOOP!!! Stop? What's now again?
This time they were pointing at our tripod and camera equipment. It was not allowed! Heli, yes. Cameras, no. Hell, things had looked so simple this time, and now it was all problems and we had to go through that lengthy discussion again. We understood that next door was the king's summer residence or something, and they were very concerned about paparazzi. To resolve the problem, we were offered to buy a disposable Fujifilm camera (the kind you use once and then give away as a whole for developing the film) – it happened to be available at the booth for two dollars. Hmm, after a quick glance at our several thousand dollar camera and photo equipment, we decided the little single-use camera was not exactly what would help us. :-)
We finally did manage to get clearance and walked to the designated flying area we'd chosen the day before. Before attracting a crowd by flying, we decided to shoot another AFD panorama. The view is simply breathtaking! You will love flying there in your computer simulator! We'd like to describe things in more detail, but this is something you simply have to experience – words are not enough.
After fetching our bags and the heli (you need to hide them behind trees/objects so they're not visible in the AFD shots, but in a way nobody can steal them), it was time for take-off. The shadows of the trees behind had come pretty close to the temple by now; that's something you don't want, because if the heli is first lit and then flies into the dark section, this gives a bad contrast – a general problem of filming, no matter what equipment you use. That's why in film productions artificial lighting is so important! The only way for us to deal with the situation was to move a little closer to the structure and to use a special wide angle lens on the camera.
The flying itself started smoothly – I felt the machine was lacking power, but then, it was really hot, and as we know from Egypt, electric models have some problems with that, too. So we continued and tried to create a scene where the heli first dives down out of the sky, the camera picture following closely. When it comes through the towers, the picture suddenly opens and – woooaah! – the full size of the monument becomes apparent. This leaves you breathless! The heli continues down towards the camera, after a short pause the picture follows and zooms in just a little bit. Then a quarter flip to the left, and up it goes in a cone. The camera follows at first, but stops when the machine has reached the outer left position, and the picture then fully reopens. The viewer is left with a fantastic full shot of the scenery while the heli spirals out of the picture into the sky.
For all the R/C pilots among you it will be clear that flying such a sequence over a terrain with obstacles is not the simplest thing. If, in addition, you have to get a good film shot, then one battery pack is damn short!
Having said this, the Hacker (Flight Power) 12s 4900 mAh pack we were using seemed to be flat after just five minutes of moderate 3D; when really pushing it, 4 - 5 min. is okay, but in this case, 7 - 8 min. should have been no problem. All of a sudden, the heli lost head speed, so quite obviously there was a problem. I switched to throttle hold and brought it down in an autorotation. We took off the canopy to have a look, and – uuhh! – everything was incredibly hot, especially the battery pack. I pulled it out and immediately saw that the six cells in the back were ballooned! Okay, put it in a safe place so it won't damage anything if it goes off! We imagined what would have happened if it had caught fire in flight, and if we had crashed into this world cultural heritage site or the king's summer palace next door …
Having said this, the Hacker (Flight Power) 12s 4900 mAh pack we were using seemed to be flat after just five minutes of moderate 3D; when really pushing it, 4 - 5 min. is okay, but in this case, 7 - 8 min. should have been no problem. All of a sudden, the heli lost head speed, so quite obviously there was a problem. I switched to throttle hold and brought it down in an autorotation. We took off the canopy to have a look, and – uuhh! – everything was incredibly hot, especially the battery pack. I pulled it out and immediately saw that the six cells in the back were ballooned! Okay, put it in a safe place so it won't damage anything if it goes off! We imagined what would have happened if it had caught fire in flight, and if we had crashed into this world cultural heritage site or the king's summer palace next door …
Anyway, we kept the simile and put in the second pack to take some cool photos. No problems this time, so right after the landing we packed together and left for the hotel. The whole action had taken about two hours; it's insane how much different things there are to do besides the flying as such.
Back in the hotel we informed our home base around Nicolas Kaiser, Lukas Grunauer and Samual Hänger about the battery problem. Next we talked to our friend Ken Yap in Singapore (the next but one stop) if he was willing to accept an international express shipment for us; no problem, and we forwarded the address to Nicolas Kaiser. You sometimes get the impression this man acts faster than his own shadow – less than 30 minutes later he informed us by SMS that the spare pack was already on its way to Ken Yap in Singapore. Thanks a lot – and well done!
Okay, that's it for Thailand.
+++ mission completed. end of transmission. +++
Labels: Ayutthaya, battery pack problem, Thailand, Wat Chai Watthanaram
# posted by hg/tuw @ 15:51 
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