Since then, Peace River Studios has produced films, developed interactive media for exhibit environments around the world, designed and created a variety of specialty photography equipment, and worked with photographers and cinematographers on their own projects. Past projects include three-screen, full motion videos for both the New England Aquarium and the South Carolina Aquarium, an eight-screen journey through the Pacific's "Ring of Fire" for the Osaka Aquarium in Japan, the signature film From the Forest to the Sea for the Sewee Visitor Center near Charleston, South Carolina, The Voyage of the Mimi, a 13-part dramatic series for Bank Street College broadcast (and re-broadcast) on national television and distributed with multimedia programs to schools, and a series of four films about the Cape Cod National Seashore that included segments on whaling and sea rescue, the geology of the area, Thoreau, and Marconi.

Much of this inventiveness is due to founder and CEO John Borden, who entertained himself as a kid in Vermont by making things in his family’s workshop. In his work as a filmmaker and photographer, Borden has ideas for shots that can only be achieved with special equipment – so he has built camera stabilizers, cable cameras, remote-controlled cameras, a three-camera rig, a portable dolly system, panoramic tripod heads, and other custom devices to get those shots. Some of this equipment has been used solely for Peace River Studios’ productions; other tools have been further refined and are available for sale or rental so that photographers and filmmakers can take advantage of them. Always excited by improvisation and improvement, Borden loves the challenge of making equipment lighter, better, cheaper or faster. “In almost every case it’s been a matter of wanting to get another angle or see something differently or find another way to get at the subject,” Borden explains.

Peace River Studios has remained a small company over the years. In part this is due to economics: small companies can operate without excessive overhead and also retain a good deal of flexibility. As Borden says, “Having the mobility of a small company is a benefit. You can turn on a dime and make decisions quickly. You can also take on fairly large projects by using outside talent, so you’re not limited to the size of the project. Fortunately, in this business there are many talented freelancers.”

PRS combines two interrelated functions as a business: producing films, videos, and interactive media and designing specialty camera tools. The tools and technical solutions are applied to its productions as well as rented or sold to the industry.

The production side of the business concentrates on all aspects of film and video production: researching content and writing treatments and scripts, procuring imagery, editing together programs, etc. John Borden (director), Joana Hattery (executive producer), Molly O’Brien (producer, writer, editor), and Craig Evans (associate producer, editor, IT consultant) all have a hand in this process.

The design and engineering side focuses on developing, and refining specialized photography equipment. John Borden (president and founder), Marc Davidson (engineer and software developer), and Craig Evans (associate producer) all have a hand in this aspect of the company.

VRMAG forwarded a list of questions to PRS’s Molly O’Brien.

John Borden founded PRS; can you give us a little history about the early days of the company, how it was started, and a little about John’s background?

John first picked up a movie camera when he was 13 years old. Not content to film a static scene, he took it over a ski jump! In his senior year of college he became involved in film more seriously when he decided to capture a dancer in action. Wanting to follow the performance on foot, John designed his earliest camera stabilization device to steady the camera while he moved around the dancer. Ever since, he has been designing various kinds of camera equipment to help him “get the shot.”

Of the many customized pieces John Borden has developed, which has had the most commercial success?

The GyroPro camera stabilizer is probably our most commercially successful piece. It’s been around for a long time so it’s an evolved design. It’s been used on dozens of IMAX movies, for features, television ads, and on our own projects of course. It allows cinematographers to get smooth shots from boats, moving land vehicles, and aircraft. People appreciate its hardy design and easy operation – and good results!

PRS practices what you call fusion filmmaking: a synthesis of filmmaking, interactive media, digital imagery, custom photography and storytelling to create one-of-a-kind productions. Can you describe one of these productions and each of the elements used in composing it?

Here’s one example of what we call “fusion filmmaking.” We were commissioned to create an original, three-screen video for a circular theatre at the South Carolina Aquarium in Charleston. We were responsible for everything – a script to screen project. We started out researching the content, developing a storyline, and selecting sites for filming. The storyline was simple in this case: following the journey a drop of water would take from its origin in the mountains of South Carolina through Piedmont streams, coastal swamps, a saltmarsh estuary, and a pelican nesting island until it reached the Atlantic Ocean.

To show the client what the final product would look like, we created a full-color storyboard in PhotoShop using digital imagery we’d shot on location. We also built a schematic model of the space. Because we wanted to be able to show panoramic images across all three screens (which would span 130 degrees), and would be doing all our shooting outdoors in natural settings, John built a three-camera rig using lightweight video cameras. We used this setup on a helicopter, tripod, foam board, pontoon boat, and inflatable boat. During the shoot, we used the GyroPro camera stabilizer to steady the camera while traveling in a boat.

We edited the piece in Apple’s FinalCut Pro, shrinking down all three streams of imagery so they could be viewed on a single monitor. We also worked with our hardware consultant to figure out how best to rig the theatre with a curved screen. We flew down to the Aquarium for installation to oversee the process, adjust the projectors, and (the best part) watch the visitors enjoy the show.

This particular project didn’t have an interactive component, but we’ve worked on many other projects that do. A project for the Museum of Science in Boston required that we photograph different animal skulls using our ObjectMaker. The end result was a virtual representation of the skulls that visitors can rotate in the computer to see the objects from all sides. For a visitor center in Hawaii we produced an interactive that invites visitors to learn about how atolls form. In this case, we didn’t use any of our own equipment, but developed a storyboard and worked with an animator to create the program. We’re currently working on a multi-player interactive exhibit that combines original video and stock imagery in an educational game show. Many of our exhibit clients want one-of-a-kind media exhibits, so each project calls for its own combination of tools and talent.

How is your team structured that enables your company to creatively gather together these different media? And what kind of creative cross-pollination happens as a result?

We encourage collaboration and cross-pollination in-house. This isn’t a hierarchical organization where everyone protects his or her square of turf. Except for the workshop, which needs to have its own separate space for milling parts and assembling the equipment, our office is laid out in a fairly open fashion. Conversations flow around the space, and our attitude is that a good idea can come from anywhere and anyone. “Doing the research, developing the tools, and finding the right combination of elements to make something work, is almost inevitably a team effort,” John says, “It’s important to have some overlap – but not too much. The whole spirit of working as a team is what makes it all work.”

Having been in the business so long, we also have a good Rolodex to access when we need additional assistance. The Boston area is loaded with film, multimedia, and high-tech talent. Of course with the Internet, it’s easy to work with people thousands of miles away as well. We recently needed to adapt the PixOrb so that a special film camera with an intervalometer could use it. We tracked down the company that made the equipment in Los Angeles, who then referred us to an electrical engineer in Ohio.

Peace River Studios has been involved with a number of award-winning programs for TBS and Nova, among others. How do you get involved in these projects and what is your typical degree of involvement in terms of concept development, production, custom equipment, etc.

Following the Tundra Wolf, the movie that launched Peace River Films, received quite a bit of attention and made it easier to pitch ideas. No one had done anything quite like it, and executive producers were interested in seeing what else we could do. It really got the ball rolling.

In terms of our level of involvement, it typically runs from script to screen and everything in-between. John noted that for Seasons of the Navajo, “we wrote a 300-page document before rolling one frame of film. We’ve written most of the films we’ve produced, as well as done the research and treatments. ”

How did Apple’s QuickTime VR come to play such an integral role in the company’s interactive media projects, and when did you first get involved with QTVR?

In the late 1970s, John was part of a team based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that developed special equipment and techniques to create a surrogate travel interactive. This landmark interactive program became known as the Aspen Movie Map, and one of the members of the team went on to work with Apple Computer. A few years later, she heard that John was working on an interactive program about the Mayan ruins at Palenque, Mexico. One of the tools he was developing was a camera system to film historic artifacts so that they could be looked at from all angles on the project’s interactive CD-ROM. This was the first “object maker.”

“Apple was in touch with us about new ideas and new technology,” John recalled, “And eventually asked us to build them an automated ObjectMaker unit. They had an idea of what Quicktime VR could do, but they didn’t have the equipment to use with it. As they developed Quicktime VR, they asked us to work on a panorama system because at the time there was no easy way to make cylindrical panoramas – you had to cobble together all kinds of little gadgets in order to get your camera to move around the center of the lens.” This process resulted in both the ObjectMaker Camera Positioning System and the 3Sixty Panoramic Camera Mount, which were formally released in 1994 and 1995 respectively.

The video on your website of PRS’s GyroPro camera stabilizer at work is quite impressive, was it designed specifically for IMAX cameras? What’s the timeframe for conceiving, designing and producing this type of equipment? Can you tell us an instance of when the GyroPro was used on an IMAX shoot?

_answerJohn’s approach is to build tools that are scalable and flexible and can be customized to different situations. The original Gyro was built for a 16mm movie camera, but John designed it so that many kinds of cameras could fit on it, from a huge IMAX camera to a tiny digital video camera.

The length of time it takes to develop the equipment varies. The Gyro has been through many iterations because it’s been around so long and has been used in many kinds of situations. The various camera systems we’re working on now, such as the PixOrb, have shorter development times because we’re augmenting work that’s already been done. The PixOrb software, for instance, is an extension of the TrailRail software, and the TrailRail software was inspired by the ObjectMaker. All advanced motion control programs have been written by our in-house engineer, Marc Davidson. These tools share similar hardware components as well, so they can be scaled up and down in size; they’re a modular system that can be used in many ways. John calls it “an erector set approach.”

The GyroPro has been used in numerous IMAX shoots. For the film Survival Island, which was shot in the Antarctic, the crew fashioned a big stretcher to carry the Gyro and camera across the beach so that they could film as they moved around a group of elephant seals (another version of moving around a dancer!). Another crew used the Gyro to film antiquities and villages along the Yangtze River that were going to be flooded by the enormous Three Gorges Dam project. Director David Douglas used the Gyro for the filming of Straight Up!, an IMAX movie about helicopters in action. For a scene about live high-tension wire repair by helicopter, the Gyro had to be specially isolated so that its electronic components wouldn’t be ruined. The Gyro has just returned from off the coasts of Africa, Argentina, and Canada, where the filmmakers who produced last year’s acclaimed Winged Migration were using it.

Visit Peace River Studios Gallery page for a selection of object and panorama movies.

Read the article on the Peace River Studio Pixorb Tripod Head.
Email: Molly@peaceriverstudios.com