No.8 Re-wired: Cablecam

This may well be the only invention in the book to be able to say those familiar words ‘I’d like to thank the Academy . . .’ – for the Cablecam, and its inventor Thornton Bayliss (or Trou as he likes to be called), won an Academy Award in 1998. It was a pretty big deal for a guy from Te Puke who left school at 15 to surf, then got a job working the camera on a small film shoot and was hooked – eventually ending up in Hollywood working alongside some of the big names in the industry.

The idea behind the Cablecam came when Bayliss realised there was a need for a system that film cameras could use to get into tricky-to-film places, where a traditional camera couldn’t go and where a helicopter or other flying device wouldn’t work.

He spent three years tinkering with the system and using tricks from his fishing and timber industry experience before getting a patent in 1993. The Cablecam was initially designed to be used for sports, and one of its first uses was filming the Kentucky Derby horse race. It was then used for the Winter Olympics in Norway in 1994 before crossing over to the film industry proper. It’s been used by some big-name directors like Spielberg, Cameron and Burton (Tim, not Richard). Today hardly an hour goes by when the system is not being used, particularly in televised sport.

The Cablecam system works by rigging cables between frames, and in the original version they suspended a platform device underneath for an operator to sit or lie on. Unmanned cablecams are now more common, but imagine the thrill of travelling up to 130km/h on a thin cable while peering down a lens at the action below.

The system is well known for its smooth operation and easily repeatable way of getting long tricky shots where other systems fail. It can extend over 600m and – as they said at the Academy Awards – ‘it can function at speeds and through perils that would be unsafe for on-board operators’ such as down rivers or up mountains. It was used in the film Dante’s Peak to do just that. Speaking of that Oscar, Bayliss received a Scientific and Technical Award for the system, although he didn’t believe it when he got the fax telling him he’d won – he thought it was a joke. When the invitation arrived with gold lettering on it and ‘probably costing more than my couch’, he realised it was legit, and picked up the award on the red carpet.

Bayliss continues to innovate with camera and film systems: along with Kiwi colleague Harry Harrison he developed the ‘Flite Line’ camera wire system, which was used in a 200m single-shot ad for State Insurance in 2012.

His new system is about a tenth of the size and weight of the original Cablecam, it’s self-propelled, it can go up to 190km/h on an 800m long ‘string’ (as Bayliss calls it), and ‘it’s great for shooting noisy sh*t that goes fast!’.