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Author
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Topic: Cinerama Adventure
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Graham Ritchie
Film God
Posts: 4001
From: New Zealand
Registered: Feb 2006
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posted December 01, 2011 01:54 PM
Came across this interesting book a while ago written by the late Harry Wigley in 1965 and was founder of Mount Cook Airlines. Harry Wigley died in the 80s.
He writes of filming "South Seas Adventure" and what was involved in the New Zealand part.
Here is some of it, as written by Harry Wigley.
The flight tests were reasonable satisfactory, but it was really asking too much of the Auster and our margin of safety was reduced too fine a limit.
A pod with a square frontal area thirty inches by thirty inches, about five feet long and with its rear pulled into a rough streamlined shape was made of plywood and attached to the rack of one wing. With the cameras in, this weighed slightly over 300 pounds. A similar but smaller pod to house the batteries was hung on the racks of the opposite wing and it is amazing that the aeroplane managed to fly at all.
The plane was then flown to Christchurch and after being modified to meet with the Cinerama team's approval the gear was mounted, but the camera, which was considerably heavier than the batteries, was shifted from the port to the starboard side.
To counterbalance the uneven weight the fuel tank on the side of the camera had been left virtually empty and the one on the side of the batteries had been filled, but somehow this fact was overlooked when we went for a full-load air test after all the gear was fitted. As well as having full tanks on the same side as the camera, I had on board a sixteen-stone cameraman who sat in the front seat, also on the same side.
The three weeks or so we spent with the Cinerama team were extremely interesting. The Auster was dangerously underpowered for this particular job, and I certainly would not tackle it again; Nevertheless some quite spectacular results were achieved.
Within a fortnight of the film being released in New York, people were arriving at The Hermitage and asking to be flown round the "Cinerama route" and the col between the Anzac Peaks and the eastern arete of Mount Cook through which we flew has been known as the Cinerama Gap ever since.
The pod in which the camera was housed is slung up to the rafters of our Timaru garage. Sometimes when passing it I glance up at it and shudder.
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