Advanced Aerial Videography: Storytelling with Subjects

1. Introduction: What's going on, guys? My name is Drew, the owner and chief pilot here at Wild Rabbit Productions. I'm Katee Laine and I am the camera op for Wild Rabbit Productions. We're a Los Angeles-based aerial cinematography company, and we're going to be giving you an inside look into professional aerial cinematography. In this specific class, we're going to be talking about how to shoot a subject, how to tell a story, and how to plan for that and all the pieces in between to create a really nice narrative using the drone. Once you add an element of a subject and you try to tell a story, it's a whole other ballgame. We're telling a story and we're replicating a lot of things that we do in our normal day-to-day, whether its larger drone, smaller drones. This whole scenario is walking you through a normal working day for us. We're going try to show you some things that we've done before and some things that we've never done before and try to take things a little bit further. Today, we are going to be flying with a DJI Inspire 1. It's light, it's nimble, it packs up really small, and best of all you get a dual operator system which takes the shots to a whole other level. Your pilot focuses on putting the drone in the position that it needs to be in, and your camera operator focuses on composing the most beautiful shot possible. You need to understand your story, you need to understand who you're shooting, where you're shooting, and why are you shooting it, and making sure that all those pieces come together into one cohesive storyline, and we hope to give you all that information today. 2. Project Prompt: The objective of this class is for you to put together a one-minute narrative piece. To do that, you're going to select a subject, determine where your story is about that subject, and then find a location that inspires you. You're going to put all that together in your storyboards, plan out the shots using the shots that we've already run through in the previous videos, and then you're going to go out and execute. Once you're 100% confident that you have all the shots, you need to tell your story. You're going to go back to the editing room, chop it all up, and then you're going to end up with a one-minute piece you are extremely proud of. You can toss it into your portfolio and potentially gets more from it. 3. Building a Narrative: The key points of making a film is having that intro, having that climax in the middle, and then having that ending establishing. The star we did choose today was filming a jogger, but then taking it to a surprise, so it's going to surprise the viewer when they weren't expecting this jogger happened to be a ballerina, and I don't think most people are going to expect her to do start doing flips and jumps in the air, and that's one thing that really keeps your viewer hooked to watching the whole film. So, those are definitely key points that you want to keep in mind when you're building your storyboard. I want something to where's the viewer is not going to want to look away, get bored after 20 seconds of watching it, you want that hook, you want people to really just stay glued and just you want that Holy Molly moment, how did they get that shot? Especially with drones. It does take you from the dawy of the shots that we're going to be talking about in this video where it takes you dawy to a crane, but we're using foreground elements to really surprise the viewer that you couldn't be able to get with any other tools. We did everything that Katie explained, we had talent, we had a location and for this project we just did a very loose narrative. We didn't want to get too hung up on story because we wanted to feature the action and the space more than anything, but we wanted to start and end well. For today's story, we have our jogger running through Los Angeles. She begins to hear music coming from warehouse. She becomes curious, she walks in and finds record player playing some alluring music, and she's enticed to start dancing. We realize that, she's an incredible dancer, and then the rest of the pieces simply about finding her in these spaces as she's discovering this warehouse, and in the beautiful life and the character that this place has so, she's discovering and then we're discovering her as well. So, that's the simple narrative of the piece, and that's the story that we're telling. 4. Location and Subject Selection: Picking a location is something that you always are doing, we're constantly inspired, just driving to the grocery store. We'll see an alleyway that looks really cool, has amazing graffiti, and potentially some some cool elements, power lines, something crossing over top that we could potentially do a really cool top-down tracking shot of somebody running through the alleyway, or we see a open field, that we could pull another shot at it. So, it's a constant thing that you're doing, if you're passionate about creating anything, you're going to be constantly looking for elements that you want to shoot, or you can shot within, or you can pull a story from. So, that's what we look for. We look for things that inspire us, places that have amazing light, or a lot of character in a building, like this place here, that we can then play off of to tell a story. Another aspect to looking for locations is opportunities to do things that we've never done before. So, in this warehouse, we have these incredible rafters behind us, and throwing a twirling ballerina, and with these rafters above that we can use to wipe in front of the foreground, we start at a low angle, and rise up through the rafters. It's an opportunity that we haven't had before. So, we really wanted to come in here and play with these elements, and create something new. During your search for locations, just always be thinking about the type of moves you can do in those locations, and how you can try something new, or try a shot that you've been working on. If you see a location where you can do a grand reveal, go ahead and think about that. Think about the types of shots that you can add to that space, and add a different dynamic element to that space. When you're choosing a location, you definitely want to keep your subject in mind. You want to make sure that the location is fitting to the subject, and the story that you're telling, and you want to make sure that it's not such a mismatch that it takes away from what you're trying to tell. When we're selecting a subject for personal work, for the most part, we've looked for people with some extreme talents; either skateboarder, surfers, ballet dancers, race car drivers. We're drawn to people that are extremely talented at what they do, and it brings the best out of us, and they push us, and we push them to get incredible shots. Using the drone is such a dynamic camera tool, it's constantly moving. So, shooting a subject that is moving makes our shots so much more interesting. We can orbit around a person playing a guitar, standing on a rock, and that adds amazing production value to a music video, or any other types of videos like that, but once you add an element of speed, and tracking, and motion, plus more motion, it ends up with such a dynamic, beautiful shot. So, that's why we definitely are drawn towards moving subjects. So, the location we choose today, we already had our talent in mind, which was a good friend of mine who happened to be a ballet dancer, and I wanted to steer away from the typical. We've already seen in a Leotard, or a tutu, dancing around in a studio. I wanted to bring a more realistic, but also more natural vibe to it, and something that hasn't really been seen before. So, instead of making her in the typical tutu and outfit, we actually put her in a jogging outfit. We found a location that's a little less clean, but has a beautiful atmosphere for a cinema that makes it more cinematic and motion picture feeling. It steers away from the amateur level. You have your talent, and you have your location, and that's where you begin to tell the story. Where do you want this story to go? How you are going to introduce her to this location? How are you going to film her in the location? How are you going to let the story end? What's going to be your grand ending shot, that's going to conclude this story? 5. Storyboard and Shot List: Right here we have a shot brief. This is basically a whole treatment going through a concept location, close model and storyboards. Storyboards being the most important. It's what's tying everything together, and it's the most important planning step after you get all your main details down. Storyboards don't need to be anything grand. As you can see here, these are really quick and dirty, but we're just getting our ideas down on paper. So, when we get on set, we start shooting, we know exactly what it is that we're looking for, and then we can play off from there. But you go in with a plan and deviate later. Don't go in with no plan and just run around and try to grab whatever you can. You won't be as productive and you may end up with a bunch of stuff that doesn't really go together at the end. You want to keep the story as consistent as possible. This is one way to keep your story on track and not to make it confusing or forget that you have any shots that are definitely necessary to make your story flow better and to make it all make sense. Each frame of our storyboard, we just have quick little drawings of where we want to start as well as arrows showing where the camera's going to move and a little one-word reference. So, the opening shot, we wanted to start tracking on the ground. You see the ground rushing to the foreground, and then the camera tilts up to reveal the feet and then up to a three quarter of the model running down the streets. So, that's what this is representing here. Ground, tilt up, feet, three-quarter, three-quarter head and shoulders and then she sprints past the camera. That's really what this is representing here. This is a second shot here on the right. Tracking her running in, slowing down, hearing the music, and then you see the camera orbits from a rear three-quarter to a front three-quarter close up. You see that we executed that shot outside as well. So, the next shot after this intro shot that brings you into the story is a rear three-quarter tracking shot of our talent running, running next to the warehouse where she hears music coming from. Then the camera is going to go from a rear three-quarter, orbit around her to a front three-quarter close up. Now, that's really doing is establishing where you are in that time and place, and also getting what is happening. That's basically the beginning of your story. You want people to get what's going on and that's how you tell the story the best way. You want the viewer to be just as curious as your subject matter in the video. Then here, our next plan is to track with the model overhead into the door of the warehouse. This is a shot we're going to have to reassess on once we get the model here and once we get set up the shoot. We planned this out beforehand and now that we're in this space, we're looking at the door, looks a little too low to pull off the shots, so we're probably going to deviate from this. But we have this down, we know that we need to lead her into the warehouse, and that's essentially all that this is telling me. The next step is to bring her in so she can discover what's making the music. We also have options. So, say we do have a shot planned out, but like a situation like this where we realize the ceiling was too low, we have an option two for that particular obstacle we run into. So, here we have option one, tracking overhead, and option two where we're tracking her straight in. Once now that we're here we may try another option where we track her from the side. We just kind of wipe off the door as she enters in. It's something we'll probably try. Probably try the second and third option today. That's also another point too. In storyboarding, you want to plan out the shots of how you're beginning it and how you're going to end it for the next transition into the next scene. So, when you come down to your final footage and your final selects, it makes cutting those pieces together much more smoothly and makes more sense, and it creates a story seamlessly. One great tip that we can give you is to find a storyboard template online, print 20 pages out and just start sketching. Just get your ideas down on paper. If you don't like what you have, crumple it up, throw it away and start again. So, after we lead our talent to the warehouse, she discovers the lone record player just playing beautiful music and she's enticed to dance. That's the bulk of our beginning. That's the beginning part of our story and then from there, like I said earlier, it's about just her discovering a warehouse, her discovering the amazing space, and then us discovering her in those spaces. So, from here on out, we just storyboard specific shots that we thought would be really dynamic, really interesting, really show off the capabilities of the drone, the door operator system as well as the space and Andy's talents as a dancer. So, you can see here that's what these shots are. Upstairs, back reveal, over metal rafters in the ceilings, having the floor dropout below, this is a really cool shot that we're going to try later and hopefully, it'll turn out how we expect. This is a corkscrew shot. This is simply me putting the drone in place trying to keep it on top of Andy keeping her center, and then we're going to raise and lower as Katie's doing an opposite corkscrew to her spin as well. It should be a really simple fairly simple camera move, but it should have great production value. It should be really nice if we can pull it off. This is another shot we thought would be really cool because we have a dual level space, we can start ground level, rise up to the top, wiping one of the raft or beams right in front of the camera revealing our dancer in the upstairs space, a new space that we haven't shown yet, and we're going to surprise the viewer with that. Yeah, so we kind of established the beginning of our intro. This dancer going into the studio and get into the climax of the middle of the film where we are discovering her throughout the video at the warehouse. Then when it is important how are we going to end this story. We, for this particular one, we thought of two endings that might be cool. Where it's a grand ending and she ends on an amazing move, and it's an amazing move on us that's just finalizes the whole song and the whole vibe, or we go take a different approach to where she just nonchalantly walks out of warehouse, no one ever knew she had an amazing dance session by herself. So, it's great to have options because we may end up in a situation we like one or the other, and when it comes down to editing, one may fit better than the other, and so it is great to have a few options. Another option we didn't actually storyboard we discussed it when we got here this morning. We thought it could be interesting to have leave the viewer wondering whether she actually went into the warehouse or not. She just stumbled upon this warehouse and then she continued running, and in that moment that she peeked inside, she had this elaborate daydream of her using the space but she didn't actually have the courage to go inside and check it out. So, just to reiterate the importance of storyboarding, going in with a plan, knowing what it is that you want to do as well as so that everybody else in your crew knows what's going on, what's happening during the shoot. If you have some people helping out on the day of they know to go ahead and prepare this other space because they know that we're moving there next. It helps everybody along so today, it makes the workflow a lot smoother. This treatment slash call sheet is something that we send out on personal shoots. It gives a brief overview of the projects, locations, call times, contacts, location photos that we took beforehand. These we did on the [inaudible] and then photos of the model, what her capabilities are, and then the styling options for the day just to solidify the whole vibe. Give everybody a picture beforehand that we're not in on the entire creative process so they can walk in and be as valuable as possible on the day of. 6. Dual Operators: In addition to stepping up the objective for the class, telling a narrative, adding a subject, we're also moving into a dual operator drone system. This is going to add a whole other level to the type of shots that you can pull off simply because the pilot focuses on pilot, gives him a lot more precision, and the camera operator focuses on purely composition and making sure that the subject is held in the frame, and you can pull off a much more dynamic shot, hold a much nicer composition throughout. With the dual operator system, pretty much any type of tracking, trying to hold any subjects in the center of the frame especially if that subject is moving is very difficult in a single operator setup. If you're extremely skilled at it, you can probably pull it off, but at the end of the day, your composition will be lacking. You're going to be trying to just hold that subject in the frame, and you're not worried about how well that framing looks, where your drone position is. If you're high, too high, or too low, or if you want the subject frame left or frame right. When you add this system, it really allows me to do my job, and for her to do her job. We're constantly communicating from before we take off, during the shots, and this is really all about communication. Katie and I have been working together for almost three years now. So, there's a lot of situations where we don't necessarily need to communicate, because we just know in this situation, I'm going to do this, she's going to do that. But when you're working with a new camera operator, a new pilot, you want to have extremely clear communication before the shot, during the shot, and after the shot, about what you liked, what you didn't like, and how you want to do it differently in the next take. When we are working in dual operator, a lot of part of my job if it doesn't require a whole lot of camera movement, say, it has to do with a lot of speed, that's where the communication becomes really key. Because, say you do have a subject where they're moving really slow, and you're tracking with them, and then they speed up, and then they slow down. It does make it really hard for your pilot to stop and slow and see where that subject is in that time and place. So, it is my job to make sure and communicate to him where she is in that time and space, and what direction he needs to go and how fast and how slow that will overall make the shot very clean and look like it was intentional. Anytime you have something that's a little bit of out of whack, it'll show, and if it does show, that makes the film not as precise or compositionally well done. Yeah. Essentially as a pilot, Katie's my eyes and ears for what the camera's seeing. She's constantly telling me what the framing is, if I need to be higher or lower, she's my air traffic control in that sense. I as well will reference the monitor and if I see something, I'll let her know. Okay. I'm going to break right in three, two, one and I'll start to move. Or I'll say I'm going to dolly left three, two, one, I'm going to crane out three, two, one. So, we're constantly communicating and I'm counting down so she can anticipate my move and so she can make this move, this camera move as well. So, we'll either plan out shots or we'll improvise while we're in the air and we'll make sure that that's clearly communicated so we're not wasting time, we're not having to go back and redo a shot because I made a move without telling her and she missed it. Or she made a move without telling me and I put the drone in the wrong place. So, today we're going to be working with DJI Inspire 1. It's their newest line of professional aerial cinematography products. It's a drone camera platform and video downlink system all-in-one. You can run a single operator or a dual operator system. Today, we are going to be doing dual operator so we can show off all the versatility of this system. It's especially great for an indoor environment like today because it's really small, it's really nimble, we can put it in places you can't put larger drones as well as it has an optical flow feature which helps us lock in our position when we don't have access to full GPS signal. The Inspire is different from Phantom 2 Vision Plus in that this camera has nearly 360 pan capabilities, and these legs retract up with the propellers and it gets them up out of the view of the camera so the camera operator can have an unobstructed view for creatively controlling a shot. So, over here we have the Inspire 1 controllers. We have a pilot controller and a camera operator controller. The video feed from the camera is wirelessly linked to the controller and it's outputted via the DJI Vision app and that gives us full control over all camera settings, drone settings, and it really puts the power of this right in your hands and lets you control everything. You don't have to bring it down to change camera settings, that's all right there at your fingertips. I don't have to wait until the drone ends. Say we needed a shot right away but the director wanted to see the shot that we just got. So I can run playback on the screen right there forehand while Drew is still hovering in the air. Just so we are saving flight time and just video feed in general. The director will go over a shot, whoever's in charge of your shots, if it's you, but if we see something that you don't like right away at least you know that right away and you're still hovering and you can redo that shot right away. All right. So, for our Inspire 1 case where we have the Go Professional cases. There are travel mode Inspire 1 case. So what this does is it lets us store the Inspire with the camera attached and the landing gear in the down position so we can pull it out and take off as quick as possible and we don't have to take it out of travel mode. Also lets us fit in both controllers; pilot and camera controller, and tablets for each as well as up to six spare batteries. When you go out, you want to make sure all your batteries are charged. Here you can see we need to charge two. We have spare lanyardd. You always want to maintain full control of your controller especially for the pilot. You never want to have an instance where you have the opportunity to drop your controller, end up with it out of your hands. We have multiple chargers, all the peripheral cables that we could possibly need to get through a day of shooting. Again, with these Inspire batteries, this is about 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 minutes of flying, tons of flight time. You can get through an entire day with probably two-thirds of these battery packs. But it's better to be overprepared than to run out of packs halfway through your day. Another crucial piece of equipment that we always bring with us on every shot, big or small, is a calm system. This gives us open communication between our entire team, between the director, the pilot, the camera operator, and your visual observer and your drone tech. So, everybody in your crew can have open communication. I can be on one side of set, my camera operator can be on the other, my drone tech can be preparing batteries and set up to spot my shot, and we can all be talking to each other like we're standing next to each other. It's extremely valuable. It's been one of the things that has completely streamlined our workflow and made communication so much easier for us on set. 7. Executing the Shoot: Now, here's our camera control, our RC settings. We're running a custom setting, so we determine what tilts down, tilts up, pans left, and pans right. So, we have everything on one stick. Pan left, pan right, tilt up, and tilt down. We are shooting at 1080, 24 frames. We're shooting a 16 by nine image. Our color were on log, which is more of a cinematic, it's a flat color profile. We're running a custom color profile. We're down on sharpness and on contrast, down on saturation, negative two on each. This allows us to bump up those values in post-production. So, we shoot everything flat and then we add the color, the contrast, and the sharpness back in with our editing software. This gives us all of our settings, our height, our distance from home, our vertical speed, our horizontal speed, our battery power, the amount of satellites that were connected to, our flight mode. So, this is all very valuable information to the pilot. As a camera operator, we can get rid of all this stuff and set our histo wherever we want it for our framing. So, we can just focus on getting the shot as a camera operator. But all those settings are controllable with the pilot app as well. All right. Clear for take off? Clear. Clear for take off. Just roll, roll this one. Speeding. Stay pan left, Katie, stay horizontal. All right, cool. Ready for landing? Ready for landing. Speeding cut. So, that first shot, we were just feeling things out. We know the action that we want. But when you're shooting with a drone, you're always going to surprise yourself of what you see once you get it up into the air. So, there's always an element of improvisation. You need a plan, but you're always going to deviate that from that once you see something that inspires you, it's really cool. So, from the pilot standpoint, I'm just looking for interesting places to put the drone. I'm trying to fly it as smoothly as possible, to set Katie up for the best shot and the best composition possible. So, we're going to run another quick take. There's a couple of things that we saw in that take and we're going to try to do them a little bit better. Placement. All right, getting the timing down. We saw where we wanted her to be when we wanted her to be there. So, we let her know those directions, and we're going to try to give it a little bit more precise this time. Going up, Katie? Yeah. Thank you. Moving over into the front here. Going to drop it down to the left. Okay. I'm going to orbit around. Perfect. Okay, I'm just going to do a left, right to left. Yeah. So, we got the entrance shot of her walking into the space, discovering the music in the warehouse. Now, we got that major movement coming in. Now, we're just going to cut. Some piece, some B-roll. Some B-roll. Quick cuts that we can just put in there for extra mood. We're basically just playing off these rafters and using them as foreground elements to wipe to the frame. Another cool trick is, once you're editing the piece, you can use that wipe in front of the screen to come into or come out of a shot, instead of to cut into another shot. It makes for a more seamless piece that way. Are we clear for take off? Clear. All right. Ready? Are you ready, Katie? Yes. All right, action. How was that? Good. How was that? Back again? Yeah. Hold on. Looks good. I am going to wipe to the right. Okay. How's that? Beautiful, got it. If you want to actually start right around here, yeah. Then, we'll just, we'll move in with you. Actually, I think this will be a awesome side tracking shot. So, let's run that. Everybody, clear for takeoff. All right, copy that. Okay. You're ready, Katie? Ready. All right. Action, Andy. Jazz is beautiful, slow down, slowly now. Gorgeous. Gorgeous. Okay, come back, yeah. In for number a little bit. Yeah, bring it back. Nice, yeah. Nice. Yeah. Beautiful, cut. Perfect. So, that last shot we just got, that was essentially the dolly shot that we've talked about in previous videos. So, we did a side dolly tracking with Andy. Then, once we got to the end of that shot, we reset and we started with a side dolly, and slid it around through a front dolly tracking shot as well to finish out the moves. So, that's the versatility of using a UAV in these type of situations, is because we're free of tracks and we can slip it from a side track to the front track and get a beautiful shot. Let's weigh it like a- as soon as he hits the door, wait few more seconds, then call action on her. Okay. I'll call it. All right. Three, two, one. Action. Beautiful, cool. That was a different take, that was good. Let's do that one more time. Okay. Get set. It's a little late. All right. Three, two, one. Action. You like that? One more time. A little bit earlier. Earlier? Ready clip. I know. [inaudible] All right. Three, two, one. Action. We nailed that shot in the last take. There are definitely some challenges there, getting the timing right, communication to our talent Andy, and communication between our spotter, camera out, and pilot, getting everything in sync to get the timing perfect is very difficult. Also, when you're flying indoors, you got to be extremely safe. Only for skilled pilot and operators in general. So, don't even try this unless you've been doing this for quite awhile, you know exactly what you're doing. The other challenges are these are GPS-based machines, so you want to make sure all your compasses are calibrated and that you're flying in a non GPS-based mode. So, fly in ATTI mode with your optical flow if you're using the Inspire 1, that'll give you nice indoor position hold. Control the camera. So, I wasn't doing, actually doing too too much. It was more about getting the timing done, coordinating with my spotter and my pilot when they should call action. I waited until we got the door in the foreground past that point. Then, as soon as we hit the middle, that's when we cue her on action. Just so the framing and composition is just right. Most keeping my hand on the stick because that generally keeps it really nice and stable, otherwise, the motors, you can tell the movement. So, that's all the really major move housing, is just keeping it stable and steady straight towards her. Cool. So I'm going to get up and hover and if you want to just do some spins in. Okay. Spinning? Yeah. Okay. Clear for takeoff. Flavis start back. Yeah. Clear for take off? Clear. Clear. How do you like that? Yeah, I like it. Get me up higher. Yeah, there you go. Okay. All right. Action, Andy. Is she in? Yeah, now she is. Little slow. There, right there. Hold it, there you go. Dropping in. How is that? Beautiful. Perfect. All right, let's move on. Cool. So, we had a shot aborted in this room or during a top down, kind of bird's eye view top down, just holding still, of her doing a nice spinning move. That wasn't working out very well. The ceiling was too low, we weren't able to get enough space between the drone and her. It was too tight. I wasn't able to hold position well enough and any movement by Andy was just thrown a shot off, so. A little too tight, so, yeah. It always happens when you do get up we will find those mistakes, and so immediately we will find another situation where it does work. So, where we come up over the move last-minute, or we can take the situation where we did see something beautiful, but turn it into something else, where we did the overhead shot. But then, instead of staying so overhead the whole time, you can tilt up and it shows that nice reveal of her. It's a rearward reveal. So, we came in, we started on the scene and then dropped her in front of the camera as we crane down in front of her. So, that's a wrap. We got seven different setups today, multiple shots within each setup. We got everything that was on our storyboard, and then some. Everything that was crucial to our story, and a lot of great things that we found throughout the space. I think we can say that we're 100 percent confident we got everything we came here to do and then some. Yeah. Really excited for this ending piece. That's the best part, putting it all together. Yeah. 8. Analyzing the Footage: We just had an awesome day of shooting for our advanced aerial cinematography class. Now we're sitting down to go to the footage to see what we like, what we don't like, match things up with our storyboards and start piecing our one minute narrative video together. We're going to be able to see what worked, what didn't work, pull our selects and then start the editing process. Referencing our storyboards, the stories first start outside and then our subject Andy is going to be lowered inside the building, but we're not going to start outside, we started our day shooting inside. The light wasn't great. It was like 11 o'clock almost noon really nasty light out there in North Hollywood. So, no reason to start outdoors. The light was gorgeous inside so we decided to jump ahead on our boards and start with the good stuff. As you can see there, working with the drone it's challenging, you have to really plan your shots and make sure that you're keeping everybody on set out of view. It's one of the difficulties that we're constantly battling. So with a 360-degree camera, that's always something you have to be wary of. But here, this first take, we're just playing with the area. We knew what we wanted, we knew that we wanted to follow her in, have her discover the music, the record player, and and then just freestyle a little bit from there just like any feel in music and do her thing. This is all going to get chopped up, it's not going to be one seamless shot, but this was a very effective first take. We saw what we liked, what we didn't and then we're going to move on from there and try it again. Andy walking in, we started that frame on the door. We didn't really like how that was looking after running playback. So, we decided to start looking at the ground and then we're going to pan up with her as she walks in a nicer way to reveal her into the room. Again, this is all with a drone-a flying camera. One of the most difficult things is maintaining a really nice composition especially with working with a video system that has a small bit of latency, coordinating those moves is really really crucial. Katie and I work with a CALM system. So even if I'm not standing right next to her, we have clear and open communication so we can make sure that we're timing these moves as well as possible. So again, we started on the ground, on the crack of the door interesting composition framing to lead Andy into the building. It's a really nice opening shot moving from left to right and right to left again and then back up over the beams. After the first couple takes, we started to really coordinate and plan out our moves with Andy and getting in sync with her and ourselves. One of the things about operating a drone, you're used to seeing the vantage point from the ground. You're very used to that. It's very, it's a lot easier to set up a shot and plan a shot from the ground because you know what that looks like. When you're using a drone, especially in more complex situations, there's always an element of surprise, you're not 100 percent know what it's going to look like up in the air. So, you're always going to deviate from your plan when you see something new, you see something that catches your eye or that you like more than what your original plan was. So, there's always a bit of improvisation and just working with your camera up. You guys getting in the moment and knowing what works, what doesn't work, and just having fun and trying to get the best shot possible. So we blew that shot a little bit. We got ourselves in the shot, but right here we redeem ourselves this is really nice crane up rise up over the beam. We had practices a couple times and we nailed it on this take. Nice, let her out of the frame. We'll cut it before that, but that was a really nice shot there. This is one of our niceness takes. We kind of broke it up into sections which worked a lot better than trying to just pull the whole shot in one take. We had a really good communication between Katie and I on thus take, that's really nice low sweeping shot, the paralaxing background. We're just letting Andy do her thing here and we're just going with the flow. This we talked about following Andy and just wiping her out of frame. Really nice moment there. The beams in the foreground. Even this here coming in on her. Finding her coming dropping down through the beams really really really nice moment. We felt like we had the first shots so now we wanted to just grab a couple of nice moments here. We saw some things that we really liked in the first few takes and so we wanted to repeat that. So here we were revealing Andy. We're coming in off the beams, revealing her dancing below and then craning down for a nice solid stop and then. So, we just had her dance in place and then we worked around her executing the shot that we're discussing right now. So, we're wrapping up over the beams, keeping clear communication, pushing in the fine Andy and then letting her out of the frame. So we grab those nice moments working over the beams and up over the beams and down below and here we went for a little flash dance, inspired dancing to the light. Little segment here is really really beautiful shot. We'll probably cut it right there but a really nice moment and then if you're flying out shot or you're coming back as well. So we saw this moment and to do something a little different, we wrap the drone and the camera out in front of her to show a change of perspective. This shot right here required really clear communication because we have Andy on other side of the building. Pilot and camera operator are on this side of the building, and we're trying to get the timing done perfect while flying to this hallway, we're meeting Andy on the other side. So this is going to take us several takes to get the timing perfect, but we nailed it on the last take. It was a really beautiful shot and there's a lot of good moments in the takes that weren't exactly perfect as well. So, even that little moment there could be a cool quick second and in your final edit. So there we missed it, we're a little late and still a great tape but not exactly what we're looking for. We wanted to be a little closer in when we caught her come into the doorway. That one was almost it. You can see that I hesitated. I hesitated right at the last minute. There we go. Perfect we nailed that take there. That was beautiful. That one is also good a little tiny bit late. So, this shot was a little bit of a longer take. We felt this room is really interesting and so we wanted to lead Andy into this room. A lot of cool elements to play off of. The staircase, the wall, the forklift, but ultimately the light was just really really nice. We had this glass, this big glass roof that was like a massive soft box for us and then we also had the fluorescence and nice other lighting element. But yeah, just a cool room we wanted to grab a couple moments in here. We didn't fully have a plan, we just knew we wanted to work in this room. So we kind of let Andy freestyle and we just kind of worked with it. Like the first take in the main room we were just seeing what happened. We shot and let Andy kind of do her thing and then we saw the lights. We saw where she was going to go. We communicated and we figured out what our plan was going to be for the second take. Again, we did this shoot in about a half day. Normally, you'd want a little bit more time to put together a full shoot like this. So, you can see here, our timings already done a little bit better. Her running into the area was really really nice. That's a really really nice moment the rise up as she's spinning below. We'll probably just use a little bit from this room but because we have a lot more really great footage that we got at the end of the day as well. We had a couple of nice moments in that first shot and we felt that we were kind of done with it. It wasn't working 100 percent for us. We got some some bits that we will use. So, we wanted to have Andy interframe. We wanted to start with a high shot have Andy interframe below and which you saw at the start of that take there it's made for a really really cool moment and then here we wanted to get just a overhead. A perfect overhead of Andy doing some spins. Again this is a really difficult shot to line up this requires your subject to stay perfectly in place and then you have to get the drone and the camera directly overhead. One of the hardest shots you can do is especially in this closer proximity we didn't have a lot of overhead room I was pretty much up on the ceiling and it's a little easier when you're outdoors and you have a lot of overhead space but in this situation this is a fairly difficult shot. Poor Andy, we're just making her do spins for about five minutes. But some nice moments in there that's all we're looking for in this. So this is actually interesting right there at the end of that take I pulled the drone back, Katie tilted up with the drone as we pulled back and down and we saw really nice, actually a really nice moment there so we wanted to recreate that in which we did right here and that ended up working so well that was a beautiful shot. With the drone, you're always going to surprise yourself, you're going to see something that you didn't quite plan for and if you see something you like go back and do it again and make it better. So, we reset again here, pull back over her doing her spin. Beautiful shot right there. So, we didn't really plan for that. We just saw it and we went for it and made it happen. So, in the shot, this is a really dynamic warehouse. There's a lot of levels, a lot of elements for us to play off of. This is an upstairs machine shop and in the warehouse. It has beautiful wood floor, beautiful windows, massive bandsaw, metal bandsaw upstairs. Really awesome room. So, we wanted to reveal from the bottom floor craning up and pushing in, revealing Andy. No other tool can you get that shot. This is another one that was fairly difficult working out the timing. We wanted to rise up and have her do a leap and really difficult to get the timing down but ultimately really cool shot. You can use that front beam and editing bay to do a wipe off of one of the other shots. We have a beam coming in full frame so we may end up playing with that a little bit in the editing room. What you saw in this piece is a lot of communication, a lot of trial and error and not being afraid to kill your baby per se and throughout a shot that isn't really working and move on to something else. We didn't talk a lot about specific shots, crane out, crane down, pan left, pan right, dolly in, dolly back. This class is just really about working and being creative and planning and understanding what makes a good shot environment, lighting, subject matter, camera movement, drone movement and putting all that together to tell a story. Thanks for taking the class, we're really excited to see what you guys come up with. This is just how we do things and we're really starting to see how people take what we do and change it and make it their own and come up with something completely different. Because you know there's more than one right way to do things and we're really excited to see how creative you guys can get and what kind of cool ways you can use your drone spherical cinematography. Good luck out there, be safe, fly safe, have fun. 9. Dance Crazy SkillShare HD: does that go?