Ignite Digi couldn’t find the perfect mount for the kinds of shots called for by their TV production clients. So they made some themselves. It caught on. Paul Hellard gets to grips with this niche manufacturer in Hobart
Tasmania-based Ignite Digi first opened its doors in 2014, established by Tom Waugh as in-house cinematographer, and Aeronautical Engineer/Gimbal Operator Chris Fox operating and engineering the drone camera platforms. Originally forming as an Aerial Cinematography duo, they built Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones, and modified gimbal and camera setups to enhance their business offering. Today their products have been used on some of the biggest film and television productions around the world: Including Disney’s Mulan, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Marvel’s Venom, Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and many other film, television and Netflix programs.
Ignite Digi bought their first CNC machine back in 2017, from OKUMA. “Having just come off a big government job, we were making our own small widgets in our bench to help our jobs along,” explained Waugh.
Chris Fox is an aeronautical engineer by training. He self-taught himself the CNC system and the CADCAM process. “We were in his garage and his granny flat was our office. Throughout 2017 to 2018, Ignite Digi transitioned the business from just being a film team, to where manufacturing became more of our income than the filming,” Waugh added.
Using a small CNC router to cut carbon fibre sheets, they built drones and modified gimbal and camera setups to enhance their filming service. They added an OKUMA Genos M560V 3-axis CNC Mill to the garage to make aluminium parts. Chris taught himself the CAD and CAM process, continuing to use Fusion 360 due to the ease of a single program.
From there they gained interest via social media from other gimbal and drone operators around the world and so the e-commerce store was started.
In 2018 they won two awards for their product ecosystem: the Bob Miller ACS Technical & Innovation Achievement Award; and the Cine Gear Expo LA: Best Camera Accessory. From that point on they shifted main focus from film/TV service to design and manufacturing.
“Our products are mostly 6061-T6 aluminium, and then some Ertacetal® plastic parts. We use an OKUMA 3-axis Genos M560V and two OKUMA 4-axis MB4000H horizontals with ten pallet APC. The horizontal 4-axis enables us to make a wide variety of products in smaller batch production runs,” said Fox. “With the additional benefit of the pallet pools meaning we can run overnight with no staff on site.” Since moving from Chris’ flat and garage at the beginning of 2019 to a large workshop, they have grown to a team of eight people, with significant investment in three OKUMA CNC Mills.
They also have mechanical, cable and PCB design and assembly, as well as a photo/video studio in-house.
“With significant investment in two OKUMA MB4000H 10-Pallet Horizontal CNC machining centres, each with OSP-P300MA Control which runs un-manned virtually 24/7 plus the latest precision OKUMA CNC Vertical Machining centre Genos M560-Ve, it has enabled Ignite Digi to be highly competitive and to cater for small batch size production runs,” said Fox. “With total design, development and manufacture in-house now including a new electronics division, the company is able to move quickly to meet the needs of customers throughout the world including USA, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and further afield. This total in-house design to manufacture allows the company to move much faster with significantly improved costs.
Dolly Grip
On larger film/TV productions, there is a grips department, looking after cranes, cables, dollies, tracks and other kinds of camera support, meaning: literally, supporting the camera. In these days of gimbals, the job might be handed to a hybrid crew like Ignite Digi allowing dynamic camera movement, as well as the usual camera operation in cinematography.
“There are always local commercials being produced in Tasmania for some of the bigger brands we have down here,” explains Waugh. “These TVCs can bring better budgets because they’re destined for a national or international market. The budgets influence the kind of shots being planned.” The motivating force for Ignite Digi starting to make their own parts was when they invested in their own broadcast digital camera, the ARRI Alexa Mini cinema camera in 2015. “We bought the Alexa when it first came out, and found we were doing some big drone aerial work from the very beginning,” said Tom. “I guess it came from our own work on ‘spec. We had to have a CNC router to make carbon fibre plates to attach the cameras to the drones.”
“We’d done a bit of design work with another guy trying to get stuff made to do drone optimisation,” explained Waugh. “It became frustrating, so we made some widgets for the Alexa Mini. We owned this camera, and we had the only one in Tasmania. A director we were working with told us he’d love to be able to take the camera from a tripod to a drone mount, to a car mount, to whatever kind of purpose, quickly, because well, time is money. We started down the wormhole of optimising that process.”
Waugh and Fox posted a lot of their work on social media, @ignitedigiaustralia. This gathered a following from other camera and drone operators and soon they found a new organic market for plates, attachments and lugs for the range of professional digital cameras from Arriflex, RED and Sony.
These attachments are solid enough to attach handles to. Cameras can be quickly attached to cranes, pulley systems and even to high-powered drones for those ubiquitous aerial shots. No camera operator is in business these days without the ability to shoot from the sky.
As the small IgniteDigi team became more experienced in CNC work, they looked at refining the functionality of their camera attachments and decided to combine an aesthetic look as well. “There was an organic growth to our market because these attachments were fitting so many cameras, and many more small studios were kitting up. Our customer base are cinematographers and other visual creatives, they appreciate the functionality, look and robust design for years of onset use/abuse.”
Government help
The Tasmanian Government has been on board in supporting small business manufacturers in the state. Waugh tells me they were assisted in acquiring a Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) earlier in 2022.
“Having the CMM enables us to measure parts with the precision for assemblies, tight tolerances and means if there is an issue, we know it’s a design issue, not a manufacturing issue”
“We are one of the only places with a CMM in Tasmania and we hope we can pass that knowledge on to other manufacturers down here or even just the accessibility to see it in action. Rather than just say, it’s just ours, we want to collaborate with people. ‘A rising tide lifts all boats,’ as they say.