In the distance, the faint lights of a city twinkle through the gloom. Seen through the thin fog hanging like a veil above the water, they look cold and far away.

On the shore-line a complex of wooden piers and shacks clad in rusted corrugated iron, protrude through the foggy half light. Above the piers, the dim glow of work lights strung along the walkways casts dowdy shadows across the detritus of an exhausted industry. Everything is old and spent. Beneath the main shack a man emerges wearing a blood spattered apron: he hefts the gutted carcass of some enormous fish into the oily discoloured waters below. It’s bitterly cold.

There’s a tap on my shoulder. “Fancy some breakfast?” It’s five o’clock. Five o’clock on an icy wet Buckinghamshire afternoon and Martin Honeywill of Unusual has arrived for breakfast and work. As we trudge off for a cup of Pinewood’s splendid tea (35p, a bargain by any measure) Honeywill begins to explain just what it is that Unusual are doing here. “This is the nineteenth Bond movie.” He let’s that short statement sink in. “Yes, I was surprised as well.” This one’s called ‘The World is Not Enough’, with Robbie Coltrane reprising his role from Tomorrow Never Dies and Robert Carlisle playing a baddie.

I had, in fact, been at the studios several hours before Honeywill arrived. Escorted by a charming girl (Melitsa) from the Eon Productions Press Office, myself and David Mayo of Unusual had been shown over the set alluded to above. It’s built in and above Pinewood’s famous water tank, home to some classic Bond scenes of the Supertankers-swallowing submarines kind, and Jaws (the character, not the fish) biting a shark. The set is vast, and because it’s a night-time shoot (hence the 5.OOpm breakfast) the whole thing is enclosed by a giant black cyclorama 80 feet high, punctuated by small fibre-optic lights here and there which create the illusion of the distant city. For Bond 19, the tank has been enlarged -another four metres of width has been added to what is already approaching a two-acre site. The entire scene - huts, walkways etc - is a mock-up caviar factory supposedly on the Caspian Sea. It’s a very imposing piece of work. Most of what you see may be a film set, but it’s entirely structural - enough for a BMW Z8 to run along the elevated walkways. It even supports the tonnage of an old Rolls Royce, though what on earth either of them is doing at a run-down caviar factory on the Caspian Sea is anybody’s guess. Down the east and north sides of this artificial semi-sunken lagoon a railway track is laid, upon which sits an enormous Liebherr tower crane.

Honeywill picks up the story. “It’s rented in from Belgium. It’s pretty heavy-duty as tower cranes go and has a self-weight of 160 tons. The boom extends some 80 metres; at 19 metres it can lift 40 tons double-reeved and even at the far tip it can pick-up 3.5 tons. The boom height is 30 metres above ground.” All very industrial, and I can vouch for the size of the thing, having personally bottled out about five metres from the top of its spindly ladder, but it’s not there to unload fish eggs. “What we’re doing is flying a helicopter, a Squirrel as it happens, repeatedly taking it out over the set, suspended from the crane.”

Which all sounds a bit over the top . . . unless, that is, Melitsa had taken you up to the helicopter stand earlier in the day and pointed out the l8ft mechanical saw that hangs beneath it. Driven by a small motorbike engine, this device is a set of one metre diameter rotating buzz-saw blades - all real steel I might point out - with sharp pointy teeth. “So some precision is required then?” I asked Honeywill, doing my best to raise a suitably non-plussed but quizzical Brosnandian eyebrow. “Yes, although that accuracy is demanded mainly for the filming. We reposition the crane several times for different shots (hence the railway track) and each time we have to replicate the stunt manoeuvre precisely for each take. But there is one special scene where the helicopter saws the end off the factory. James (Lee, who co-ordinates all the helicopter stunts) has to stand within the building holding one of the many emergency stops we deploy. There were cameramen and stunt performers present within the building at the same time, as well as the director, which is why he (Lee) needed to be there with an emergency stop. James is unable to see out of the building, all he hears is the approaching buzz of the saws and then suddenly it’s upon him, ripping through the roof, followed by a fair bit of pyro as the side of the building falls away into the dock 20 feet below. That’s a pretty good justification for pin-point accuracy. Indeed.

This particular sequence was also a one-time stunt; despite the efficacy of the buzz-saws, the building is trick-built to split as the blades pass through its balsawood beams. Once blown off, it would be some considerable expense to re-build it, hence the attention given to capturing it all in one take. Lee’s safety angle apart - precision is everything. “We’ve modified the crane substantially,” continued Honeywill. “And the helicopter too. Its engine has been stripped out and the blades have been removed. They’re put in later using computer graphics. The two vertical bars on the sides of the mounting are to maintain the helicopter’s attitude and stop it rocking. Built by the Special Effects Department, the two bars are telescopic devices allowing the Helicopter 9.2 metres of vertical travel. The tendency to rock is neatly dampened by the application of two car tyres at the top of the device.

“There are four main axes of the crane,” continued Honeywill. “The position of the crane on the rails is set by a laser positioning system. The tracking, hoist, and slew are all connected by encoders which feedback to our Automation Control system.” The system is tight enough to recall any positional data to within a millimetre. Now a one millimetre tolerance might not be any great shakes when compared, say, to a motion control system for a big theatrical set truck, or some special event in a theme park, for example. But when you consider that this is the same control system Unusual supplied for the Petronas Tower manned descent stunt in ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ (but here integrated into a bloody great crane), then you begin to realise what a sharp, but flexible bit of kit it is.

“It wasn’t quite that simple,” reported Honeywill. “For the slew we were able to fit an encoder to the existing ring gear at the top of the tower. But for tracking we had to change the motor and gearbox. For lift we use the existing 90kW three-phase motor with our gearing, giving a hoisting speed of 1.6 m/sec. We also removed the motor’s electromechanical drive and ‘slugging’ (possibly not the correct term, but in essence a damping device to reduce stress on pick-up) and installed a 120kW electronic drive. For tracking, we put in a custom system, including our own 7.5kW motor, but driving the existing pulleys and dollies. We can now track at three metres per second.”

Needless to say, the increases in operational speed reduces the lift capacity of the crane. Liebherrs also colluded with Unusual to determine other limitations, notably the levels of movement, acceleration/deceleration which, if exceeded, could obviously make the crane become unstable.

In terms of programming the stunt-moves, one interesting problem emerges. As the helicopter tracks away from the tower, the boom obviously deflects as the load extends. Hence, none of the positional cues can be referenced from ground points, because the crane jib isn’t at a constant horizontal relative to the ground. Thus, all the various stunt sequences have to be made up by manual commands and then entered as data points step-by-step, referenced from the crane itself. “We started in mid December,” said Honeywill. “We dealt with the mechanical and encoder modifications to the crane on site, then started to build the cues in January. There are two men in the helicopter for the actual shoot sequences, one to control the saw and the basic attitude of the chopper - the other is part of the action, firing a bazooka out of the window. So to run a positional cue we had to add dead-weight to the helicopter equivalent to the two men, then take the helicopter out over something like a part of the set that’s to be cut through, and lower into contact.” Once that positional data is in, Honeywill can modify the cues off-line.

The mechanical modifications were not so straightforward, not least because they were conducted almost 100 feet above ground. “That made things tricky, especially as it was sub-zero up there. But worse was when we tried to strip out the existing tracking motor and discovered it had been cold-fitted using liquid nitrogen. Eventually, we had to call on Liebherrs to pull it apart for us.”

Talking to James Lee on the evening of my visit, it was obvious this marriage of construction industry to state-of-the-art motion control was proceeding much to his liking: “I had every confidence that the automation software could provide the necessary accuracy - Unusual had proved that when I used them on the Petronas Tower plunge three years ago. The thing with film work is that it’s much like commercial presentation and rock and roll - there’s no such word as ‘can’t’. That’s the ability I needed to know would be there when it came to dealing with the crane. Because of Unusual’s history in manufacturing and engineering, none of the mechanical modifications had to be subcontracted to a third party. That makes things faster, easier, and makes me feel a whole lot happier that everyone involved understands the full picture, not just their little part of it.”

Filming ended in March ‘99, the precious long dark nights of winter having dictated an uncompromising shooting schedule. By now the crane will be safely back in Belgium, all traces of caviar removed from Pinewood, and the movie should be just coming out as you read this. If you can’t face Bond number 19 and don’t want to re-visit ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’, but would still like an idea of what else this control system is capable of, try The Mummy, and see if you can figure out what it did.

Article reproduced from LSI Oct 1999. Author Steve Moles