When I joined Egripment nearly 20 years ago to manage its U.S. office, I was new to the camera-support side of the film and broadcast industry. Born in Hollywood, and having lived there most of my life, I knew the company was a highly regarded brand in camera support, playing a unique and pivotal role in many broadcast and film productions. I didn’t quite grasp, however, what truly drove its business and its success. Not long after the company hired me, Constant Tresfon, who founded Egripment in his Holland garage in 1976, met with me at its Dutch offices. I still recall that meeting, and what he told me.

As Constant put it; “Egripment doesn’t develop a product just because it fits the mold of a new or interesting application. Rather, the company designs and builds products that the industry needs; whether to solve a problem or to make the job of the camera operator easier and more creative. In doing so, Egripment also doesn’t create products that may have worked in the past, it seeks to move the industry forward with cutting-edge solutions.”

At the time, I understood Constant’s words, but not his entire philosophy. Now, after years of observing Egripment’s process of designing and developing its products, I understand both. I’ve experienced firsthand how his words ring just as true today as they did then.

Nearly 40 years ago, camera operators needed a safe way to obtain high-camera-angle shots, spurring Egripment’s development of its now well-known Tulip Crane. At the time, the only solution was a quality camera crane available through a single rental house, and that one was not for sale. To get around this, production teams resorted to a variety of often sloppy or dangerous contraptions to get these shots. As the first modular crane system in the world, the Tulip solved the challenge of getting such shots safely and effectively. The industry took notice, presenting Egripment with an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for the Tulip Crane in 1983. We still offer the product for sale, with many upgrades and improvements, and about 90 percent of all Tulips ever built are still working in the field today.

About 25 years ago, Egripment recognized another critical challenge in the industry. Certain films required shots that were too difficult or dangerous to capture by an operator working in close proximity to the camera. We partnered with a small company that had invented the first remote camera head, called the Hot Head and a short time later, we bought that company. With this development, camera operators could get those tricky, potentially dangerous shots without risk. A few years ago, Laurie Frost, inventor of the Hot Head, also won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for this groundbreaking and innovative product. Today, many in the industry use “Hot Head” as a generic term for a remote camera head, even though Egripment has trademarked the product name, the latest iteration of which is now called the Hot Head II.

Since the Hot Head was first developed, Egripment has goneon to design and build a series of special camera cranes designed specifically for use with the Hot Head remote heads. Today, the company offers a comprehensive line of remote camera heads and controls, allowing those in the broadcast and film industry to shoot safely from virtually any angle, no matter where they’re situated. If you’ve watched the Olympics at any point in the last 20 years, you’ve seen the results of Egripment gear in action. Its products have continually helped capture points of view that previously were impossible to obtain. The same is true of the World Cup, the X-Games and professional sporting events of any kind, from auto racing to baseball. Game watchers now take for granted that they will be able to see the perspective of cameras that can move around and follow the action close up, not just that of fixed-position cameras that only capture what passes by the lens. In fact, without the designs and vision of Egripment, these kinds of shots wouldn’t be possible.

Over the last few years, Egripment has recognized the increasing interest in Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) production elements within the broadcast and film industry. Making support equipment for these emerging technologies requires precise encoding data, so we had our engineers go to work on designing the best method for encoding our cranes, remote heads and dollies. Initially, we intended just to offer an encoding package for our existing products. We soon realized that merely supplying end users with the encoding data wasn’t enough, especially when it came to Augmented Reality, where live and virtual images interact (unlike with Virtual Reality applications), as they also needed to know what to do with the data, and how to interface it with their graphics computers to broadcast it in the way they wanted.

To address this challenge, we designed a complete VR/AR camera support solution and partnered with others to produce it, that allows all of the data from our encoders to be fed into a user-friendly, easy-to-use interface that is simple to program. Users can then send that complete data stream to nearly any graphics renderer on the market today and utilize it seamlessly for live broadcast, video recording or film production. This is a significant change from five years ago, before we created the system, when, in order to get a VR/AR system operating in a studio, components from several different vendors and consultants were necessary to help put the system together (with all the resulting finger-pointing and squabbling that inevitably entails). Now, when Egripment’s installers and trainers implement one of our VR/AR systems in a studio, by the time they are finished, everything is functioning properly and the studio operators know how to keep things that way. With the latest advancements, we’ve also been able to bring the overall cost of these systems down to the budget level of a local television affiliate from that of a network.

Today, Egripment produces hundreds of products, including many innovative dollies and accessories. Nearly all of our manufacturing still takes place at our own factory in Holland. Quality and care is an extremely important component of our design and development process, which is why we don’t outsource our manufacturing to the lowest bidder in other countries. We keep nearly everything in-house, so that we can be sure of the quality of every item leaving our floor.

Over the years, many companies have created imitations and copies of Egripment products. We don’t mind. In fact, we are flattered by this (so long as the copycat products are safe). But copies, even with design changes, are still just reproductions. It’s the vision and constant drive toward the future of the industry that make Egripment such a unique and innovative player in this field. I could only see a glimpse of these values 20 years ago, but now I understand them completely. They make me proud to do what I do.