Introduction to Aerial Videography: Creative Direction for Drone Filming

1. Introduction: My name's Drew Roberts, the Owner and Chief Founder at Wild Rabbit Productions here in Los Angeles, California. I'm Nathan Labruzza, I'm a pilot and drone technician for Wild Rabbit Productions. Wild Rabbit Productions is a company that specializes in aerial cinematography. Our main focus is for television, commercial productions, as well feature film productions. Today we're going to be discussing the basics of aerial cinematography going through, how to get into this from the ground up, we're going to be giving you tips and tricks along the way. Things that we have learned the hard way hopefully we can make this process a little easier for you guys. How we do what we do, from the simplest shoot to the most complicated shoot and then we'll also be running you through kind of the post-production process as well, how to take everything that you've shot and put it together in a very interesting way. What I want you guys to do as your final objective is to go out and film your hometown, go out and find things that inspire you about where you live, find a place that has some beautiful light and try to accentuate that with the different types of drones movement that so we're going to teach you today. The most important thing is to go out and have fun, and to learn while using these little tools and to find something and to surprise yourself and to shoot something that you thought you'd never shot before. 2. Project: Again, this class is project-based. So, we're going to be asking you to create a 30-second video reel of your hometown. You're going to do this by selecting a location, going out, executing the moves that we teach you in this class, and then putting those shots together in a cohesive 30-second video reel of your hometown. 3. Safe & Legal Practices: So, before we get into the creative aspects of using the drone, we're going to talk about common sense safety as well as the actual regulatory rules that are out there right now. Situational awareness. Be smart. Use common sense. Don't fly the drone in heavily populated areas. Be aware of your surroundings. Watch out for power lines, buildings, schools, airports, federal buildings, police stations, fire departments. Stay away from anything that you shouldn't be flying over or around or near. The actual regulations, we currently have a 400-foot ceiling. Honestly, we don't even recommend going anywhere near that. Anything that we do we stay around 100 to 200 feet. To be creative, you don't have to go higher. Being smart and being safe, there's always a creative solution there. Another important thing is to always maintain line of sight of the drone. Don't fly it behind trees. Don't try to fly behind buildings. Never rely on your camera downlink to maintain link if you're flying thousands of feet away, flying behind objects. It's never a safe reliable solution. These drones in a lot of ways are smarter than us, especially for beginning operator. There's a lot of safe functions built-in to the DJI platforms especially. You have orientation control. If you get turned around, there's a mode that you can switch into and it's just easy, pull the stick back to yourself and the drone comes flying home, or you can hit your fail-safe switch if anything goes wrong, and that drone will fly up, come back to you, and land itself. So, understanding what those modes are, what those modes do, and how you can use them. Just to add onto what Drew's saying a little bit, it's really important that you know your equipment. Get comfortable with it first, whether that's sitting your front room playing around with the sticks. Really understanding and knowing that, without looking at your controller, you can hit these switches because when things do start to go kind of sideways, you don't have time to really look down to see what's going on. You want to rely on the fact that you can actually just hurry and hit that switch and it's going to come back to you, or it's going to turn to a different flight mode and so you can fly back to yourself. So, I think that's kind of key. Before you can really get out there, just get familiar with your equipment and really know it through and through. I'm currently working on my FA private pilot's license and a regular practice of private pilots is to do chair flying where you close your eyes and you run through the different switches, the different procedures, things that you're going to do in an airplane. That can also absolutely apply to working with a small drone. Close your eyes, picture you flying in an environment and remember where those sticks are and what they do. Close your eyes and be able to do this in your sleep, know it like the back of your hand. Because ultimately, at the end of day, if you don't know how to use this properly, your footage is going to suffer. You're not going to get something that you like or that you think is quality footage. 4. Understanding Camera Moves: Before we go out and shoot, we're going to get into the fundamentals of camera movements that you can use with a drone. These are very basic movements but we still use them today with our larger drones as well. Also understanding this basic terminology is extremely helpful when you're trying to communicate with your team, with your camera operator, with your tech. Once you move up, if you're working with a director or DP or anybody on set, you want to make sure that you all have a cohesive language so everybody's on the same page, cuts out confusion and opens up the creative process a lot more. The first move we're going to talk about is a dolly shot. The dolly is a smooth shot staying at a consistent vertical height. This is the camera direction, this is a side dolly shot, this is a forward dolly, reverse dolly, giving you a very smooth consistent shot of your subject. You can use it to reveal into a space, start on a wall, revealing into an open space or pushing through a door to reveal another space. It's kind of the basic shot that gets transition. Once you get more advanced, its going to transition into other types of moves as well. You'll dolly into a crane shot or you'll crane into a dolly and it's kind of the fundamental move that you want to get down and learn right off the bat. The next move we're going to talk about is a crane up and a crane down and a traditional crane with a camera on it is used to do a nice low to high shot or a high to low, and it gives you the capability to really smoothly bring the camera up to a high POV or bring a high to low. Again, we can do that really quickly and easily using a drone. Essentially, the very basic move is starting low and just throttling up with a little bit of tilt down to maintain your subject and if you want to start high and just bring it down nice and slow controlled movement with a nice slow stop ending on your subject there. When it comes to the crane shot, really what it's used for is it's kind of more of like grand reveals. So, what you want to do is you can do a nice low so say like your subjects right here. This is kind of we were talking about before with the dolly being kind of a transitional shot where you dolly back out and then do a raise a crane shot and then reveal your city or a building and that's what Drew was saying it was more about establishing shots and that's really what a crane shot is mostly used for. So, we'll go back and forth and you can do like a grand reveal and go down and then pull and tie to a subject or vice versa and it really does add a nice fill to the shine. The next basic move is very simple tracking. It's essentially a combination of a dolly shot just with where you're focusing on a subject. So, you're either tracking a subject from behind, from the side, or above. These shots can be fairly difficult with a single operator setup but it's something you definitely want to go out and practice. Nate was talking earlier about getting a cone and going out to the park and practicing tracking that cone. You can do tracking orbits and it's just getting the fundamentals down and understanding how to use the drone, how to get into position in order to get those shots. The next shot we're going to talk about is a pan. When combined with your other basic moves, a dolly, a crane, a tracking shot, it can add a really nice element. It can be a little bit more difficult with a single operator setup because you're rotating the drone out of orientation, but again with practice, you can really use this shot effectively. Probably the best way to use this shot is with a crane up. You crane up and then you pan to reveal. Its just adding a second dimension to the shot and as a beginner, that can be very valuable to your skill set. Tilting the camera is our next basic move. It's an extremely simple move but it's highly effective when used creatively. Our favorite way to use tilting the camera up or down is to start with a nice slow dolly pushing with the camera tilted all the way down, and then as you push forward, you tilt the camera backup to reveal whatever it is you're shooting whether it's a subject or you're tilting up with a crane up to reveal skyline or beautiful vista. It's just another simple move that add dynamic camera movements to your shot. Just to clarify really the difference between the shots we're talking about is when you're talking about dolly, crane, or like a jip shot or something like that, a tracking shot, that's a combination of a mixture between the drone itself and the camera movement. When we talk about pan and tilt, that's more just the camera action. That's just a movement of the camera does. So, till is up and down, and the pan is left to right. So, let's say just to kind of mix the two, you would be doing a corkscrew. So, you'd be over top of subject and you'd be panning, tilting down and panning and mixing the two to get that corkscrew effect and that's really the difference between the first three shots we're talking about and these last two. It's more of just a strict like camera movement versus a drone and camera movement. The next camera movement I'm going to talk about is a reveal. This is something we use very frequently. It's highly effective and is also very simple shot to execute. You're simply finding a subject such as a large tree and you're revealing up in front of that tree surprising with a big reveal of a vista, of the city of whatever subject you're trying to film. It's essentially putting something in the foreground of the camera and then exposing what's behind it. Then you can also do a reverse reveal where you're pulling back and then surprising the viewer with that object in the foreground as well. You really have that freedom to surprise the viewer, to drop something in front of them in the foreground that they had no clue is there. So, these are some of the basic moves that you really want to know and understand before you go out and film and shoot. You definitely want to go out and practice and really understand what they are, how they're used, and how you can combine them together to create other moves. 5. Planning the Shoot: When we're working on a personal project, we start with what it is that we want to shoot and where it is that we want to shoot? That starts with location scouting. So much inspiration comes from a location. So much of your story comes from a location. Whether it's a dark, dingy alleyway or a bright beach with palm trees, that's really dictate what it is that you're shooting, why you're shooting and the story that you're telling. So, creative research is number one, knowing what you want to shoot and where you want to shoot it and everything else follows that. All right. So, our first location of the day, we're actually going to pick the location that's furthest away from our home. So, it'll make for an early morning but we'll be out at the beach when the light is beautiful, nice long shadows. It'll really add to the graphic nature of the skate park here in Venice. The next location that we're going to move to is the Venice canals, which is only about a 10-minute walk away. So, we get our parking at the Venice Skate Park and then we don't have to move again. So, this makes for a really quick transition to our second location. We just pack up our bag, walk down the street and get some shots down here. Here, our plan is just to shoot the canals. We've been here before. We've actually shot here before, but we're going to get it with some nice early morning light. So, our third location of the day, Pasadena Rose Bowl. For this shot, we're going to stay right here in this perimeter here. This is an old photo of the Rose Bowl. Now there's a big mural right here made out of bricks. They've actually redone this whole pathway here. So, there's a lot of rose bushes set up here and we're going to try to start our shot here pushing into the Rose Bowl. With some really nice moments, you have the Rose Bowl neon sign here. If we're there late enough in the day, hopefully the neon lights will be on. If not, then it'll just end up a nice, early sunset shot. It's always beautiful here. The San Gabriel Mountains in the background makes for a really nice backdrop. We should get some nice shots here but we're going to keep it simple. We'll either do a dolly push in towards the stadium and rise up right at the property line or we'll probably come in and dolly left to right or right to left, passing in front of the palm trees that are right here in this area. But always trying to keep it outside of the perimeter stadium just to be respectful of the stadium and its property. The last and the final location that we're going to shoot at for the day, for our grand reveal of downtown LA is this spot that we found quite a long time ago right near LA river, right after Fourth Street Bridge. We're able to park safely out on this road and then there's alleyway that comes down onto these railroad tracks. Really nice area, really quiet. It's private to work at, not a lot of people are going to bother you down there. You want to be safe. If you're going at night, definitely come with multiple people. If you're going to areas like this with any kind of guerrilla-style shooting, you want to be safe. You want to bring flashlights if you're going to be there at night. Bring other people just to be smart and safe about shooting in these types of locations. But, here, really interesting area to work with. You have the railroad tracks, a lot of broken down rail cars here. These are not live tracks off to the right here; these are all dead tracks. So, just be aware of that if you are ever working on railroad tracks. It goes into a situational awareness when you're using the drone, as well as for yourself and where you're putting yourself. You always want to be as safe as possible. But again, this location, really beautiful location right on the iconic Fourth Street Bridge and then the heart of downtown is right here, sunsets to the west. So, you'll have that sunset dropping down right behind the city. It'll make for some beautiful shots. Location selection is extremely important not only to determine the story that you're going to tell, but also logistically and how easy it is to get around, to carry your gear into or out of that location, where you're going to park, the tickets that you're going to rack up while you're there. It's extremely important to understand all those things before you get into a situation. One of the places that you think that would be the easiest to shoot at is the beach but, logistically, it can be fairly challenging. If you have a decent amount of gear, schlepping a couple of cases through the sand to get to a location isn't necessarily the most appealing but a lot of times it can be very valuable. It's just one of those things that you want to think about beforehand. We've had plenty of situations where we're halfway dead, out of breath because we picked a location looking at Google maps and not checking out beforehand. We end up hiking three miles through uncut trails to get a shot. Ultimately, very rewarding but do that planning. Understand what you're getting yourself into before you get there. That'll just make your whole day go smoother especially if you have a lot other shots you need to get in that day. 6. Setting Up to Shoot: But now I'm going to talk a little bit about what you need to be prepared for a full day of shooting. For us we're using this go professional cases phantom backpack, and this lets us get everything we could possibly need on to one backpack. Just throw it on your shoulder. It's awesome for location scouting, tracking through the woods, tracking to the city. Pretty much anywhere you need to go, this is an absolutely awesome way to get your gear there. First things first, laptop. We always carry a laptop with us, that way we can download our footage, playback footage right after we shoot, it makes sure we got the shot, watching things on a little screen. Screen is great for making sure that the footage is there, but not necessarily for ultimate composition and making sure that you have the exact shot. You never want to get home after the fact and realize that you didn't get it or you weren't composed exactly how you wanted it or it was a little bit too blown out or is a little bit too dark. So, having a laptop on you is the best way to make sure that you have that shot before you take off. So, here we have our phantom vision two plus, fits right in safe and secure. You can throw this thing down a flight of stairs and it's going to be pretty much safe, can't guarantee you that. So, here we have spare batteries. You want to make sure that everything is charged before you go out. Can't fly if you have dead batteries. This case we can carry 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 minutes of flight time in this pack right here which is about an hour and 20 minutes of flying time which is pretty much all you need for a full day of flying if you're being smart about the shots that you're getting. Having spare memory cards is crucial as well, you never want to run out of space or if you have a laptop hard drive, make sure you're backing up as the day goes on. We pretty much backup every few shots, every location, because if in the event that your drone goes down, you don't want to lose any footage. You want to have it always backed up. So, back up as much as you can, have spare memory cards, extremely crucial. Phantom controller, packed to a nice and safe. This is a range extender for the Phantom vision two plus. Bolts are right here. This is our monitor holder right here as well. So, this you strap your iPhone into your Android phone, your viewing device, connects up with WiFi. Everything packed really nice and safe. We have space for our propellers right here, and always carry a spare set which we have right here as well. Chargers. We carry three charges on us at all times. We also have a power inverter in our vehicle so we can charge throughout the day if need be if hour and 20 minutes isn't enough for you. But just making sure you always have access to power access the chargers is crucial. We always carry backup batteries for flight transmitter, and the all important lanyard. This is great if you're in dicey situations, you're standing in gravel, you're sending on uneven ground, you want to have a lanyard, you want to have the controller strapped to yourself, so that if you slip that controller is not dropping out of your hands. We carry a bunch of spares of those as well. Carry the proper cables on you at all times, micro-USB. If you have any issues with your digital flight controller, you can plug this up to your laptop, do some tuning out in the field, run your updates before you get out in the field as well, and that'll sure that everything goes smooth everything's up to date. As well as we carry iPhone charger to keep our phone, our screen powered up at all times, and also you can carry USB battery backups on you. That's something that we generally keep in this kit at all times. You can run a battery backup to your range extender, run a battery backup to your phone to keep that link going throughout the day. All right. We're ready to go shoot. 7. Venice, California: Ned is installing the self-tightening props. Basically, just spit them on. They are counter threaded through the rotation of the motor, so there's no chance of them coming loose during flight. Great safety feature. So, we're going to compress calibrate really quickly. This is something you should do at every location. So, you're going to toggle your mode switch 10 times. Your lights will go yellow, and you'll do a horizontal rotation around the center axis. Your orientation lights will go green. Then you'll rotate it vertically, and do a vertical rotation on the center axis. As long as you don't get a solid red light, your compass calibration is successful. Today, we're going to keep the camera movements fairly simple. Some simple cranes up, crane downs, and some dolly tracking, pushing through objects. We're going to use some of the trees as foreground elements. Just dolly through nice and smooth and add a little crane up at the end of the shot to reveal the beach, to reveal the surrounding areas. So, today's all about keeping it simple, and using your surrounding areas and objects in the foreground to play off of it, and make some nice interesting dynamic shots. While Jersey be piloting the drone, I'm going to be kind of watching his back, keeping an eye out. Because at a location like this, that's heavy populated even at this time in the morning, the drones really do draw a lot of attention. Keeping just a second set of eyes which is really smart. Cool. When I take off, I'm probably going to back up to here. I'll probably fly through these for the first shot. All right, and you are clear to take off. Okay. So, now as I'm coming back over the skate park, I'm going to tilt the camera down. You get a nice bird's eye view. Okay. Now that I'm up and I have the skate park framed in, we're just going to do a nice slow crane down. So on that flight, I had one shot that I wanted to get, which is pushing to the trees, going over the skate park, and pushing out to the beach showing the ocean. One simple execution I was able to get three or four nice moments within there, and then once we get back into that ink room, we'll see how many seconds we can pull out of that. But there should be good three or four shots in that one quick flight. Great, good for takeoff? Yeah, clear. So, for this shot, the canal's pretty low on water right now. So, I'm going to get down low, and find a nice reflection of the clouds in the water, and just do a nice quick reflection shot. Moving nice and slow over the water pushing forward. I'll be high enough so that I don't get my prop wash in the water, so you don't see that in the footage, but I'll be pushing forward, just get a nice reflection. It will be kind of a mood shot that we can toss into the reel, really great for opening or ending a reel. I kind of building up into the action or ending nice and slow. I got the shots that I was looking for, and then a nice three-quarter tilt down. Nice reflection on the water. Running up the canals, and then once I got about, I'd say probably 56 yards down of the canal, I've tilted the camera up slightly and rose up to show the horizon, the rest of the canals, the beach off to the right, and the city off to the left. It was a nice shot. Then, as I pulled it back, I panned to the right to show a whole horizon of the ocean, whole shot of the ocean. It should've been some nice moments in there. We probably won't use too much of this. They'll just be some nice mood shots that cut into. 8. Rose Bowl, Pasadena: Today we're going to do a dolly left to right into a crane shot going up revealing the Rose Bowl. So, it's going to be a very simple shot, left to right dolly, crane out to reveal the Rose Bowl sign. This is an iconic location, it's the epitome of Southern California here in Pasadena the Rose Bowl. Another shot that we're going to do as well, there's a massive Rose Bowl mural on the bricks right there. You can only see it from a bird's eye view, so we're going to pop up and we're going do a nice slow crane down and potentially throw a little bit of a pan into that as well, should be a nice simple dynamic shot. All right, and we're ready for takeoff. Since we're already up here, we're going to do a high to low crane shot just since we already have it composed, as well as we're going to dolly left during this shot bringing it right back to center. Withholding center right here. Then once I get here in the center I'm going to start rising up to the left. Passing in front of those trees, a little bit of a tilt down, a little bit of a pan left, very smooth, beautiful. Now we'll bring it back down nice and smooth. Cool. So, I think we nailed that first shot. We did exactly what we were looking for, a nice slow dolly left to right with a crane up at the end, keeping the Rose Bowl center of the frame the entire time. Beautiful shot. The second shot we got a couple nice seconds in there, we can toss that into the final view uriel. Ultimately the winds were fighting us, the wind will win every time. So, we brought it down safely, we're going to move on to the next location. 9. Downtown Los Angeles: Now we found this location just through and kind of exploring LA. See, all right now we're chasing light which is kind of an ongoing struggle but it's just going to keep getting better as time goes on. For this first shot will probably start tilted down a little bit and we'll fly from left to right, and then we'll tilt up and crane up and pan left to reveal the city. Have we clear the day off? Clear. So, as per the shot list, we're going to set up on the left here and then we're actually going to travel down the railroad tracks from left to right, heading towards the bridge and then as we get close we're going to pan left and rise up to reveal the city and the sunset. Then from here this is a regular practice, once you get up to the height that your shot, always do it in reverse. So, consider this position A and then we're going to bring it down wall, moving to the left just to add some dynamic movements to the shot. You don't always have to be going fast during crazy camera movements in order to get a really nice beautiful shot. So, once we're up here, top over of our camera movement, we're just going to hold, one and thousand, two and thousand, three and thousand, four and thousand, five. All right, so now that we have the shot we're going to tilt down here, and this is a shot we didn't we didn't talk about earlier but it's just kind of a static POV, and we're just going to hold here and let the cars moved through the frame. All right. Now that we got that shot we're going to tilt our camera up a little bit, and then we're going to crane straight down and we're going to surprise our viewers here with a little foreground element of this light pole. So, we're going to crane down, bringing the camera and the drone right in front of this light pole here, very simple move and finishing in holding, one and thousand, two and thousand, three and thousand, four and thousand, five. 10. Making Selects: So, we just finished shooting for the day. We've downloaded all of our footage, we got our folders organized based on locations that we worked out that'll make things a lot smoother. Once we get into the editing process. But for now, we're just going to preview our footage, just get an overall sense of what we got for the day and what we didn't get if we need to go out and get a few things on another day, or if there're still daylight, something that we can go back out and grab before the day is over. So, right now, we're going to start with our first location, the Venice Skate Park. Here, we're popping up nice early morning light, long shadows on the skateboarders. We have these two nice trees here. We're just framing it out, and B and I starts with a shot, push into the trees, cool element there, get the angry skateboarder to the left. Nobody is really skating here but it's just a nice lifestyle piece pushing out to the beach, waves crashing. Some nice moments there, tilting up a little bit as I come back through. Some nice shots, love the long shadows. There, the guy misses the trick but once you get into editing bay, you can cut that right where he misses the trick. Right when he's an air, he has the cool long shadow. You see the separation from the ground and the board. This is also a nice, nice couple second grab right there. Skate park perfectly centered frame, the long shadows looks really nice, very graphic. This shot, not frame great, the wind was pushing me. I didn't have GPS locked. I generally try not to fly in GPS mode when in public areas. For me, it's just been safer to have more control in those situations, but we got it back on center and did a nice slow crane down into the skate park. So, we pushed in, we tried to get this shot. It is a nice shot. Unfortunately, we have a little bit of drone shadow on there. It's one of the difficult parts of operating with a single operator system is you can't always give 100 percent of your focus to what the camera is capturing. You're always watching the drone. Really nice memory right here. That's a great little half second clip right there. So, even though we miss that first shot, when we made that turn, we got a really nice moment. Awesome. Again, on the shot, I was flying some nose-ins, circles around the skate park. Getting some closer details on this one, just moving with the skater, moving against them, trying to get some nice moments. Again, really cool graphic shot right there. I would say that this is the B squad out skating today, so not a lot of tricks getting nailed. But, in this situation, if you do have some friends that are some talented skateboarders, definitely bring somebody out, bring some talent out and have them skate for you. It's also great practice. Here, I panned out to just show a nice overall of the Venice Boardwalk. You can use this to lead into the skate park or lead out of the skate park. A nice quick transition. Again, you guys will be working on a 30-second piece so you'll want to chop this down to just really the best moments here. Like I said, out on location, you'll probably hopefully pull three to five seconds from this location, just really quick cuts or one one shot if you have just a golden five-second shot in there. So, the second location of the day, we went to the Venice canals. The canals were a little dry. We weren't expecting that. So, we improvised and tried to get a really nice cloud shot and reflection of the water, not too often that we have nice thick clouds here in Southern California. So, I took advantage of that and tried to get a cool shot here. I think it worked out pretty well. We may use a couple of seconds of that, we may just cut all. Once we get here, this is a nice high wide pullout shot of the Venice canals revealing the coastline, the ocean, and the surrounding city. So, this is a nice little moment here. Right here, we're probably around 150, getting close to probably 200 feet. It's generally about as high as we like to fly especially in crowded areas. That was a quick little 360 pan. A little fast, you could slow that down or just grab a quick moment out of that if there's anything in there that you liked. So, you can see there, the propeller is getting in the shot. So, after seeing the first take I didn't love how high I was. So, I wanted to bring it a little bit lower, tilt down a little bit more, get some more of that texture of the sky, the reflection in the water, and then do a tilt up to reveal the canal, and I did this take a little quicker. Unfortunately, I got a little bit of props in the shots. We can try to cross that out in the editing bay, and we pushed in right on this bridge and then did a slow rise. So, there's some really nice moments in there, great texture, great reflection of the sky. Then, also that last, you can cut to that last shot of the bridge and then the rise up. So, our next location, we moved up to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Even though this is a large stadium, We were smart about how we flew in this area. We never actually flew over the property of the stadium. We stay on the outskirts and to the right here is a really well known RC park. So, you have a lot of people flying RC airplanes, a lot of people find drones. This is actually one our testing grounds. This is where we come the test all of our larger rigs. So, we're very familiar with area, we fly here quite often, and we know not to abuse our privileges. So, here, we're being very safe. We're going to keep everything on the perimeter of the stadium. Even though there's not a game going on, no need to fly into the stadium. So, right here, the goal is to do a nice slow rise. Dolly to the right and then we'll crane up as we get to these trees. Trying to hold the stadium, the center frame, you can see there, I blew the shot, not a very smooth pan. But it's our first take, we are going to bring it back down here and try again. That being said, there are still some really nice moments in here. So, here, we reset the shot and give it a second take. This one, a lot smoother, much nicer take. The movements are a little robotic especially with the pan on the setup. Nothing a little post stabilization can't fix. When we come in, we try to finish and hold. So, we have a nice starting point if we did want to reverse this, but it's always good to end your shot on a nice stronghold. You don't want to unless the purpose is to to move through the shot and you want to end on a wipe-off of the subject or it's it's a moving take. But if you're doing it a crane upper or crane down, you want to start and end on a nice solid frame. All right. So now, we're onto our fourth location of the day. Sunset down by the LA River. This is nice quiet location we found before. These are dead tracks and now alive, definitely want to be safe in those regards. So, this is a beautiful area, a lot to work with railroad tracks, the dormant railroad cars that are just sitting here, nice foreground elements. Here, we're just playing around. We can say that this is essentially a scouting shot, just getting out seeing how everything looks. The light is still not perfect for us yet. The sunset's too bright, the city lights haven't kicked down yet. So, we're just kind of getting a layout of the land, seeing everything looks, and waiting for that light to equalize so we can get that perfect sunset shot. So, our lights equalize a little bit more. We move down to another location. As I recall during the shoot today, we're on a lot of steel, a lot of concrete. We're having some compass calibration issues. We made sure everything was was calibrated and saves to tick off before we did anything. You can see here the light's getting nicer. You can see the city lights are kicking on, the street lights, all the car lights are on. Everything's getting nice and even which is going to make for a beautiful shot here in a couple of minutes. It's a beautiful bridge, beautiful piece of LA history. It'll really add to the LA love letter that we're creating here. So yeah, after you're happy, do your rough edit, you pull your main selects. Now, it's time to hit the editing bay, jump in with whatever your favorite editing software is. If you're new to editing, check out some of the other editing tutorials on SkillShare, give you really great crash course in editing. Once you get in there, you get comfortable, grab some music. It's something that we use to really inspire us. Grab a good piece of music something that you feel fit your footage that'll drive your piece, and start start dropping your footage into the beat and just get into it. The most difficult thing will be ending up with only 30 seconds because you'll want to put so much in there. But try to be critical, try to chop everything down, only use the very very best to the footage that you got, and really excited to see what you guys create. I think this is going to be a great class for everyone. Thanks for your time and your attention. Again, look forward to seeing what you guys go out there and create. 11. Final Project: LA Love Letter: