In late 2007, somewhere impossibly far up the Maroni river in the Amazon jungle, Filmmaker Nico Jolliet was stuck looking for an angle (literally). Floating down the river in his dug out, flanked by hundreds of miles of unspoiled rainforest with the sun sinking quickly into the jungle canape behind him, Nico was struggling to find a way to capture the immensity of the moment. “If only my camera
could fly” he murmured to himself. In the spring 2010, while covering the devastating earthquake in Haiti for the award winning documentary Inside Disaster, Nico was again dogged by the limitations imposed on him by….well, gravity. After returning from Haiti, Nico disappeared into his studio, intent on building his own remote controlled multi-rotor helicopter camera system. After months of development, soldering and pilot training, Nico mounted a gopro camera to the smallest of his 3 multi-rotor helicopters (the 4 rotor “quadracopter”) and headed into the wilds of St Lucia to create his first demo, titled Up In The Hills. With just 4 rotors, 3 days, a crew of 2 and a backpack, Nico was able to capture St Lucia in a way that would not have been possible with a traditional set of film making tools.
