This week, I had the opportunity to sit down with Inside Disaster’s Web Field Producer, Nicolas Jolliet. We discussed his involvement in the project, and his understanding of the relationship between innovation and the evolving media landscape.

Presently, Nico is spending his spare hours pioneering the integration of numerous robotic and sensing technologies into a tool he has (in collaboration with whole communities of independent filmmakers) been dreaming of for years. After relocating to a nearby park, he demonstrated his newest creation to me: a helicopter-mounted DSLR camera rig capable of lifting several kilograms of equipment to altitudes of thousands of feet. While the rotors spin too noisily to let him track the birds migrating through Toronto this time of year, his helicopter (I suppose it’s technically a hexicopter) will be an invaluable tool for documentary production. The tool provides high quality HD footage (check out a tropical demo video on YouTube) along GPS-routed paths, at a meaningfully human scale that has previously been difficult to negotiate in the field – higher than a dolly or third-story window, and lower than a helicopter. It’s easy to find more adaptations of technological tools for the frontlines of filmmaking in a blog post Nico published for Inside Disaster, before the earthquake in Haiti even determined the project’s setting.