{"id":141,"date":"2015-11-18T15:30:23","date_gmt":"2015-11-18T15:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uwescicomm.wordpress.com\/?p=141"},"modified":"2018-01-30T13:22:23","modified_gmt":"2018-01-30T13:22:23","slug":"the-story-behind-the-cameras-filming-robots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/science-communication\/the-story-behind-the-cameras-filming-robots\/","title":{"rendered":"The story behind the cameras: filming robots"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2013, just as I was finishing my Masters in Science Communication at UWE Bristol, I was asked to help film the euRathlon<\/a> robotics competition in Germany. euRathlon was inspired by the situation that officials were faced with after the nuclear accident in Fukushima in 2011. The competition challenges robotics engineers to solve the problems of dealing with an emergency scenario, pushing innovation and creativity in the robotics domain. The project is led by Prof. Alan Winfield<\/a> from UWE alongside seven other partner institutions. The 2015 euRathlon competition in Piombino, Italy combined land, sea and air challenges for the robots to overcome. Our 2015 film team included three of us (Josh Hayes Davidson<\/a> on graphics, Charlie Nevett<\/a> on camera and myself – Tim Moxon –<\/a> as producer and sound engineer), taking with us all the lessons I learned from 2013.<\/p>\n

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Filming robots, particularly complex robots designed to respond to emergency scenarios, is a daunting task. Trying to make sure that we didn\u2019t get too technical was always going to be a problem. We had the additional issue that English was not the first language of most of the people being interviewed which really added to the challenge. Taking care and with plenty of re-shoots we managed to get round both of the problems by sticking to the golden rules: take it slow and keep it simple. This made sure that we never lost sight of what we were trying to do. Our focus was always to bring 21st<\/sup> century robotics into the public eye.\"Picture<\/p>\n

The first two days of the competition presented the individual land, sea and air trials. On site we first created two \u201cmeet the teams\u201d films<\/a> where we interviewed all 16 teams and got to know them. Luckily they were all super friendly and very cooperative which meant we got all the teams interviewed in two days. After that the real work began. The land trials were easy enough to film and get a good story line of shots as the robots were almost always visible.\u00a0 However the underwater robots required a bit more imagination. In the end a GoPro on a piece of drift wood got us the shots we needed.<\/p>\n