Catching the wind: filming Red Bull's Wings Through Tower Bridge

The producer and the director both pictured it as like a scene from a super-hero movie: two colourfully-costumed figures soar through the air above the River Thames and fly right through London's defining landmark, Tower Bridge. But this wasn't shot in a studio with computer-generated special effects – it was real life. For this incredibly ambitious Red Bull extreme sports shoot, two daring wingsuiters leapt from a helicopter at 3,000 feet above London and flew through Tower Bridge, becoming the first ever to do so and reaching speeds of 153mph (more than 245km/h).

It was all over within moments, and there could be no retakes. This made capturing the wingsuit flight as important as executing it, and doing so was made possible by the power, versatility and reliability of Canon imaging technologies.

Even by the standards of extreme sports, this Red Bull London event raised unprecedented challenges. Planning and preparation took months. The wingsuiters, Marco Fürst and Marco Waltenspiel, "did around 200 training jumps just for this day, just for this minute," as the latter put it. A total of almost 50 Canon cameras were deployed at locations meticulously mapped out to ensure that no angle would be left uncovered and not an instant of the lightning-fast action would be missed.

On the day, an army of film crew, photographers and technicians started setting up and testing everything in the darkness, hours before the helicopter took off at 5:22am. The wind, weather conditions and light all had to be right for the flight to go ahead.

"We then took our three camera operators and our drone pilot and went to Montenegro to figure out which lens needed to be in which part of the river," Jon says. "Where do we want to be a bit wider or a bit tighter, where do we need to be to get everything from the wingsuiters standing on the skids of the helicopter, jumping out and trying to follow them all the way down."

For the master position, filming the entire wingsuit flight from the ground, the A-cam was a Canon EOS C300 Mark III with a Canon UJ111x8.3B super-zoom broadcast lens. Demonstrating the versatility of the Canon range, this unusual but creative pairing was made possible using a Canon MO-4P adapter, which enables B4 mount broadcast lenses to be used on PL mount cameras, delivering power for mechanical zoom and other functions.

"This lens is used in Formula 1 a lot, and we knew we could capture the speed and depth we needed with it," says the director, Remy Lamont. "The zoom on it is amazing, from about 8mm all the way up to 925mm focal length. That gave us the security to know that we could be a kilometre away and still get a close-up of the wingsuiters jumping out of the helicopter, then follow them all the way down to landing in the water a couple of metres away, giving us the backbone of the whole flight."

Because the Red Bull London event was taking place at dawn, Remy says, "we also needed something that could react to whatever light we were dealing with. If it was darker, we needed to be able to open it up more." In addition, its optical servo technology and image stabilisation were proven in motorsports in the most demanding conditions.

The EOS C300 Mark III was perfect for the job because of its cutting-edge 4K Super 35mm DGO sensor, which captures video with wider dynamic range and reduced noise. This delivers exceptionally clean images, particularly in low-light and high-contrast settings, which made it ideal for picking out the distant figures of the wingsuiters in the dawn light, and Canon's Dual Pixel CMOS AF technology enabled the autofocus to track them even at the incredible speeds they reached.

The main B-cam was another EOS C300 Mark III with a Canon CJ45EX9.7B, a lighter-weight, more manoeuvrable ultra-zoom lens that achieves an impressive 45x zoom ratio. This was positioned on the north bank of the river, at Traitor's Gate by the Tower of London, and captured all the action from a complementary angle.

Remy has won numerous awards and worked on commercials, music, animation and scripted comedy as well as live events. Combining this breadth of experience with Jon's, they took advantage of the diversity of Canon's range of cameras and lenses for action sports to cover everything. "They had the different frame rates we needed, and the sensors we needed," Remy says, "and the flexibility really helped us. You know, you could attach a massive telescopic lens to one camera or a wide angle lens to another that you could fit in a tiny nook in Tower Bridge and get a wide angle view of the wingsuiters flying by."

Such wider shots, including vistas of London with the wingsuiters soaring through the scene, were captured mainly using two setups. One was an EOS C300 Mark III with a CN10x25 IAS S lens, a versatile all-rounder cine-servo lens with a 25mm-250mm zoom range. The other was a Canon CN20x50 IAS H E1/P1 CINE-SERVO lens, a favourite broadcast lens for sports and wildlife alike thanks to its robust build, 20x zoom and weather resistance, mounted on an Canon EOS C500 Mark II. This combination gave the required cinematic edge to the footage, with the added benefit of 4K/UHD output oversampled from the camera's 5.9K full-frame sensor, which results in superior image quality with reduced moiré and less noise.

In addition, an EOS R5 C, Canon's smallest Cinema EOS camera, was attached to a drone positioned on the south side of Tower Bridge, where the flight would end. This delivered what Jon calls "a really cinematic pickup of the final moments" of the flight: the wingsuiters emerging between the bridge's towers, completing a challenging manoeuvre known as "flaring up" to rise from an altitude of about 30 metres to 80 metres to deploy their parachutes, and safely landing on barges on the river.

There were nine manned cinema cameras, mostly shooting in 4K at 100fps, although some with different cropping depending on the lenses. This gave a degree of flexibility in the edit to reframe or slow down the action – and the footage from all the different sources married up seamlessly, thanks to the fact that they all use the same Canon colour science and produced completely compatible output.

Jon adds a special mention of the third wingsuiter, Peter Salzmann, who also made the flight but with an EOS R5 mounted on a specially constructed helmet. The camera was fitted with an RF 24mm F1.8 MACRO IS STM lens, and the small, lightweight wide-angle lens ensured bright, sharp aerial footage thanks to its fast aperture and 5-stop optical IS.

"Peter is like the fifth Beatle," Jon declares. "Nobody talks about him, but his skills are insane. He jumps out after the Marcos. Sometimes he goes before them and he's on his back and shoots them coming down, which is incredible, and he's doing it all with a camera on his helmet. His footage was amazing. You get this sense of scale – you get the curvature of the Earth, you get London, you get the sunrise. It was just beautiful."

Completing the picture were some stills photographers, including Alex Grymanis, a lifestyle and sports specialist and Canon Ambassador. His task: simply to get one shot that perfectly captures the event. He had two EOS R3 cameras, one with an RF 70-200mm F2.8 L IS USM lens and the other with an RF 24-70mm F2.8L IS USM. He favours these lenses, two of Canon's trinity of fast-aperture professional RF zooms, because of their speed and accuracy of focus while zooming – critical, he says, because the wingsuiters would be moving at almost 250km/h. The EOS R3 was ideal because of its high dynamic range and ability to shoot at 30fps with electronic shutter.

Alex chose his vantage point on the exit side of Tower Bridge and says he took hundreds of shots – and yes, he did get his perfect picture, encapsulating this amazing, one-time feat of precision flying.

Red Bull's "Wings Through Tower Bridge" event was a unique achievement, an astonishing demonstration of the breathtaking skill of the wingsuiters. But although the flight itself was measured in seconds, the athletes themselves attribute its success just as much to the months of training, planning and preparation that went into it. The same applies to the filming. To capture these unrepeatable moments of incredibly fast sports action, it took a lot of planning and preparation, plus the skill and expertise of all the crew and, of course, these top-flight Canon cameras and lenses for action sports:

Cameras

• Canon EOS C500 Mark II
• Canon EOS C300 Mark III
• Canon EOS R5C
• Canon EOS R3
• Canon EOS R5
• Canon PowerShot V10

Lenses

• Canon CN20x50 IAS H E1/P1
• Canon CN8x15 IAS S E1/P1
• Canon CN10X25 IAS S
• Canon CJ45EX9.7B
• Canon UJ111x8.3B
• Canon CJ45EX9.7B
• Canon RF 5.2mm F2.8L DUAL FISHEYE lens
• Canon RF 14-35mm F4L IS USM
• Canon RF 16mm F2.8 STM
• Canon RF 24-105mm F4L IS USM
• Canon RF 24-70mm F2.8L IS USM
• Canon RF 24mm F1.8 MACRO IS STM
• Canon RF 28-70mm F2L USM
• Canon RF 24-105mm F2.8L IS USM Z
• Canon RF 100-300mm F2.8L IS USM
• Canon RF 800mm F5.6L IS USM
• Canon RF 1200mm F8L IS USM