Safe Eddy and Alakazam (4) Stepping off that aircraft and being whisked away to a Beverley Hills Hotel as part of a film crew with a very responsible job was quite overwhelming let me tell you. For a kid from a small suburb in Sydney Australia, to be plonked in the middle of Hollywood with all those film stars and all that history and with only a background of model flying not drama and dance was really weird. The next few days were all a blur as I was introduced to the people involved with actually producing the TV series. The one standout event was my introduction to the film crew who as it turned out were the film crew that worked on Star Wars Episode One and that was a very frosty introduction indeed. For those who do not know the story about the two Star Wars robots R2-D2 and C-3PO just a brief word. These robots were real robots in the beginning and they gave so much trouble that in the end the robotics were stripped out of the shells and were replaced with real live actors. Kenny Baker was inside R2-D2 and Anthony Daniels was inside C-3P0. That all took place in 1976-77 and we met in 1979-80 so that whole episode was very fresh in that film crew’s minds. Therefore this film crew arrived on the set of Safe Eddy and Alakazam with a very jaundiced view of robotic film stars and their driver, one Keyboard Kid. On top of that they took one look at the small size of Eddy and Ali and they realised there was no relief to be obtained from sticking people in those two so it was going to boil down to toughing it out with real robots. Not a very warming thought from their point of view. This whole situation added a layer of strain to my situation which was difficult enough. So I retired to the corner of the studio most distant from where the film crew set up and tried to keep my head down. Not easy when it might be said that you were TWO of the three stars in the show! Anyway things got underway and worked started on setting up the Chroma-Key, camera, studio etc. The Chroma-Key was a very difficult thing to get right and we spent many an hour standing around waiting on that issue. However everything was so new and interesting to me it was all no problem. I loved all of it. It was a magic experience and one I will never forget. (To be continued)
The film crew need not have worried for everything went very smoothly indeed and during the two trips I made to LA there was only one major incident that I can recall and that was when I quite literally drove poor old Alakazam up the wall. It was after this incident that I could have wailed “Oh what I would give for FPV”, that is if I had known about it back then. To understand the accident it is necessary to understand the layout of film studios and what happens when Chroma Key is used. Film studios do not have corners as such, instead one wall curves into the next and the floor curves up to the wall with the curves about one meter radius. Compound this with the entire studio being painted in that bright blue we saw in the Flying Carpet photo and when you stand in a studio rigged out like that with the very intense lighting used there is an eerie feeling of disorientation due to the lack of corners and associated shadows. To understand what follows it is necessary to understand that we used models with built in perspective to provide background settings for the robots. In the following scene Alakazam was on his way back home up the yellow brick road to his castle on the hilltop. The castle model was filmed on one camera and Alakazam was filmed in chroma key on a second camera. I had a composite video on the monitor of Alakazam walking up the yellow brick road. Anyway the script that day called for me to drive (walk) Alakazam up the yellow brick road to the castle draw bridge. To achieve this I was watching the monitor which had the composite video of Alakazam walking up the road. So all I had to do was keep Alakazam on the yellow brick road on the composite screen and all was well. Alakazam was actually in the middle of the blue studio floor zig-zagging around the studio floor as I drove him up the road. It really was amazing to watch that screen. The Croma Keyed image of Alakazam wandering around the studio floor was simply overlaid on the castle set and there was Alakazam wandering up the road. The problem was I was watching the screen not Ali and the first thing I knew about something being wrong was when Ali fell sideways on the monitor. I had quite literally driven Alakazam “up the wall” until he finally fell over and broke his arm and not a single person in that studio realised what was happening. That was when I could have done with FPV and a split screen. I would have immediately noticed something wrong on the FPV screen. Actually there were many instances where FPV would have been magic. Imagine viewing one robot through the other robot’s eyes, all at robot eye level. That would have been a new screen experience. Repairing that broken arm in the studio with literally no tools to speak of and with dozens of people all standing around looking over your shoulder wanting to get back to work and then on to the next job and with a producer that was counting the cost of every minute of this little operation and I finally knew how the Chroma Key blokes felt trying to get the key set. It was not nice! (To be continued)
Just a quick note to let you know that my audio project is running overtime and I will not be back to Wooden It until about the 2nd of August.
At which point I plan to re-instal the Hero flashed with the iNav firmware and run some weight lifting tests in my backyard. Depending on how those test pan out I will either head off to the farm with the Hero for further flight testing or install the DJI Naza. Only time will tell.
Safe Eddy and Alakazam (6) After two trips to LA over approximately 5 months totalling about 10 weeks overall, the three pilot episodes were finished and it came time to view it on the big screen in a theatre. It really was nice stuff but the biggest thrill for me was seeing my name come up in the credits at the end and listed as “Puppet Master”. That was a once in a lifetime event. Back in the studio when it came time to finally pack up say our good-byes, the film crew called me to one side and took me to one of the side rooms where they presented me with an award as an Honorary Puppet Master and gave me a little trophy to celebrate the occasion. That was the best thrill of all. From Frosty to Friend, what a change. Not only that they asked me if I would be prepared to come back and radio control the cameras used in filming the TV series The Dukes of Hazard. One of their friends had just recently been killed filming a car stunt which went badly wrong and they felt R/C cameras could prevent such accidents happening again. That day Ray the producer told me to go home and stand by for his call to come back in the New Year. Sadly, or perhaps fortunately, that call never came. Sadly also, for reasons never made clear to me, the Safe Eddy series never went to air. Nor did the Dukes of Hazard call ever eventuate, so my life resumed its normal tempo and I was left wondering what a career in Hollywood would have been like? Looking back over those events even after all those years there were stand-out moments which even now give me great pleasure to recall. Like the time in the recording studio when it came time to record the sound track and I first heard the music for the sound track. The Safe Eddy theme song was terrific. To watch those well-known movie stars go through their paces putting down the voices in order to extract the most emotion from the scenes. Sitting in the editing room watching raw footage smoothed out into the final cut. It was fascinating stuff and I have never forgotten it. (Even back then I knew a lot of stuff but needed to learn more stuff) However the funniest of all was when during lulls in the recording, Leo de Lyon the comedian started telling dirty jokes through the Alakazam puppet microphone. I very quickly caught on and started mimicking the actions required and Alakazam abruptly changed from this innocent little toy School Teacher puppet we were all so used to watching as he taught little kids their alphabet to the most evil looking character telling these ribald tales. With the correct facial expressions he was totally transformed. Evil personified! Here at last was ALAKAZAM the WIZARD in all his glory. The whole studio was in fits. It was all great fun. (To be continued.)
I've been busy with other things lately, so I haven't done much testing. I'm also waiting on a new GPS module as the one I have isn't compatible. But the results from the couple batteries I ran through the TBS Disco were about what I expected. It flew just fine with iNav software, however the tuning was waaaaay off. In fact, I was testing modes and tried horizon. I just barely touched pitch forward and it proceeded to do a quick front flip lol. Which was actually pretty cool as it confirmed my hopes that a MR of this size is capable of freestyle moves.
(24-Jul-2017, 11:55 PM)RENOV8R Wrote: I've been busy with other things lately, so I haven't done much testing. I'm also waiting on a new GPS module as the one I have isn't compatible. But the results from the couple batteries I ran through the TBS Disco were about what I expected. It flew just fine with iNav software, however the tuning was waaaaay off. In fact, I was testing modes and tried horizon. I just barely touched pitch forward and it proceeded to do a quick front flip lol. Which was actually pretty cool as it confirmed my hopes that a MR of this size is capable of freestyle moves.
Thanks Reno, I will look forward to more news on your testing.
Safe Eddy and Alakazam (7 and last one.) Another of the highlights of the Safe Eddy series was one of the nicest sequences I have ever seen in a movie. Ray the producer was greatly influenced by techniques and features used in two movies; The Wizard of Oz and Stars Wars. He used the yellow brick road in all of the backdrop models (Wizard of Oz) and a sequence from Star Wars where R2D2 was lost, lonely and frightened, travelling along a country road. He decided that we would shoot a sequence modelled on the R2D2 sequence where Safe Eddy was lost, lonely and frightened driving down the yellow brick road. So I had to drive Eddy down the Road and provide the facial expressions suitable for lost, lonely and frightened. How do you get a car that looks like a dog to act lonely and frightened? How did they get R2D2 acting lonely and frightened? Again no idea but they did. Something that really helped in both cases were the sound tracks; whatever we did it worked and worked really well. When I saw it on the big screen with all the music and sound effects I was absolutely captivated, as was the audience. One very interesting thing that also helped was the fact that when a camera was pointed at Safe Eddy the whole screen lit up. While we were building the robots I always had a feeling that Alakazam was the most interesting from a filming point of view. However from the day we did the original screen tests in LA, Eddy completely outshone Ali. I could not believe the difference. On the screen Eddy was extremely cute especially with the right facial expressions. I had heard about screen tests revealing the real stars but I did not understand fully until Safe Eddy’s screen test. I begged Ray to let me have a video of that lost and lonely sequence but he would not relent. No photos or videos to leave that studio except in his hands. I still regret the loss of that video to this day. I have searched the web time after time hoping it would emerge somewhere but no luck so far. Years later (2009) I was contacted by a fellow in LA who had come across Safe Eddy and Alakazam in a second hand shop. The shop owner had bought the contents of a lock-up on which rent had not been paid and the goods stored inside were for sale. Sam purchased Alakazam but could not afford Safe Eddy as well. Nor did he obtain any of the transmitters or any of the video footage from the show. Like myself, he searched for that footage but no luck; so all of that wonderful footage that we all slaved so hard over appears to be lost forever. Let us hope somewhere, someone has them stored safely away and that someday they will re-surface. I never heard from Ray again after I left LA for the last time and to this day I have no idea what happened to him. In the course of converting Alakazam to computer control instead of tape control, Sam came across the Silvertone labels on the servos and in due course contacted me. One thing led to another and in 2010 we finally met up in LA while I was on a trip there with my family. It was an eerie feeling. Here I was once again in LA almost 30 years later to the day and finally re-united with Alakazam. He had not changed a bit but I was a bit shocked by his nude appearance. I had been so used to seeing him with his clothes on I had forgotten what was underneath. Note the tank track base that Ali is mounted on. Occasionally the script writers would come up with some doozy actions for the robots to perform. One time the script called for Alakazam to dance a jig! How do you get a robot mounted on tank tracks to dance a jig? However I did get him to dance a very elegant waltz and that was another very memorable scene. Another scripting favourite was for Ali to chuckle or suppress a chuckle. I did manage that one. The director also added to the confusion with last minute script changes when he felt a scene did not work. His favourite was to change from enter stage left to enter stage right. This required four or five people to cluster around the TX and manually operate the controls because everything needed changing. At the end of the 10 weeks I became a very experienced robotic puppet operator both at programming the tape and manually controlling on the set. I used to get the next day’s script late in the afternoon and I would then spend a good part of the night programming the tapes and back to the studio early in the morning. Sometimes we had to work 36 hours straight while the studio was free and on one occasion there were no studios free in LA so we had to fly to Denver where there were studios vacant. It was gruelling but I loved every minute of it. But like all good things it came to an end and for me it was back to building radios and flying models. Very droll stuff in comparison so I set out to learn other stuff and that is a completely different story. (The end) The link below will take you the computer programming of Ali that Sam is working on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuJu0DOPh9A
Slo, I am sorry to disappoint you but I am afraid that success is successfully eluding me to find at the moment.
I finally got time to start on re-installing the Hero flashed with iNav and everything was going really well until I got down to checking the receiver. All channels worked well with full range and the correct order EXCEPT the pitch channel, which will not move one microsecond.
I re-arranged the lead order to establish that the RX was putting out the correct signal and that was all OK.
So I got out my trusty old oscilloscope module (it plugs into my laptop via a USB cable) only to find that has stopped working as well.
That my friends was my first session back on Wooden IT. Poetic is it not?
After a good sleep and time to think I have started to cool down.
I was really upset last night. After months of work I am still no closer to a satisfactory outcome.
However what I saw while working on the iNav Hero made me want more so I have decided that I will order another Hero R2 and flash it again with iNav. I am fairly sure my exsisting Hero has been damaged somewhere along the line during all the messing about trying to flash it.
In the meantime I will start work on the Naza.
Wish me luck. I need all the help I can get at the moment.
I cannot believe that after 50 successful years of R/C I am completely derailed but a miserable FC problem.
So I think a demotion is in order. How about;
"Knows a lot of stuff but not as much stuff as he thought."
02-Aug-2017, 01:12 AM (This post was last modified: 02-Aug-2017, 01:12 AM by fftunes.)
Regarding the channel inputs on the Hero FC - sounds like you only tried PWM connection (1 wire per channel). Did you also try PPM or SBUS connection? Maybe it would still work one way or another?
02-Aug-2017, 01:34 AM (This post was last modified: 02-Aug-2017, 01:41 AM by Keyboard Kid.)
(02-Aug-2017, 01:12 AM)fftunes Wrote: Regarding the channel inputs on the Hero FC - sounds like you only tried PWM connection (1 wire per channel). Did you also try PPM or SBUS connection? Maybe it would still work one way or another?
Hi FF, I did try PPM no luck and I do not have SBUS on my RX.
Thinking about it, it is a pity that I cannot shift pitch control to another channel.
I could do that on a Silvertone TX but not the Futaba 9CAP.
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