London firm's revolutionary camera used to shoot award-winning documentary

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A London company that makes high-end camera systems is celebrating after a documentary about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, shot with its equipment, won an award in Europe.

“It’s really neat because this instrument didn’t exist (before),” Jeffrey Carson, chief executive of Spectral Devices Inc., said of the camera the company built for the film.

The documentary won a STARTS grand prize for innovative collaboration from the European Commission, which is part of the executive branch of the European Union. The award recognizes original cooperation between technology and the arts.

Carson and his business partner, Reza Najimi, an optical engineer, worked alongside Irish photographer Richard Mosse, the documentary’s director and producer, to build the $98,000 camera.

The equipment the company built relies on multispectral imaging, which, like satellites in space, uses filters that can capture images the human eye can’t make out and is more sensitive than traditional camera technology.

For more than two years, the trio worked to develop a cinematography camera designed to capture ground-level images of the rainforest from above, which had only been captured before by satellites. When they finished, Carson said he wasn’t sure if the system would work.

“It ended up working extremely well for (the documentary producers). And they were very happy. It just feels really good to have our product out there and be recognized for this.” Carson said.

Broken Spectre, the documentary by Mosse, captures the burning and deforestation of the Amazon basin, including illegal logging, gold mining and encroachment onto Indigenous lands.

Anchored to the nose of a helicopter and flown over sites of environmental destruction, the camera captured close-up scenes of the floor of the forest shot at night using ultraviolet light.

Carson said Spectral usually makes cameras for factories and university research. But when Mosse asked the company if it could build a camera for the documentary, Carson couldn’t resist the “thrill” of building something new.

“It was quite challenging. He needed it very fast. So, we basically put something together for him in about three months,” said Carson.

Normally, putting together a system of such scale would take a year to complete, he said.

Besides the short time frame, building a camera for an environment as harsh as the Amazon, with its high heat and humidity, added to the challenge, said Carson.

Still, the project fit the company’s mission to develop multispectral cameras for all industries.

“It was a project that was kind of well-suited for the company. So, this was right in line with what we want to do,” he said.

It was also an interesting project, Carson said, since “no one has really done this for the film industry” before.

The system built for the documentary was a “one-time thing,” weighing about 12 kg, but Carson said the company is working on a smaller, more portable version of the high-tech camera.

“We have the ability to replicate those particular instruments, so if somebody asked us if we could build them another, we could. But the goal here is to improve upon it,” he said.

bbaleeiro@postmedia.com

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