There is one shot in the music video where the drone was actually willing to fly. And it does look nice :D
I posted about the problem with fog, freezing cold and drone dropping out of the sky because of the icing on the props. This one is more about the process and adapting.
We had a broad idea about the music video for few weeks before the filming, we were just waiting for the main actor to show up.
Fog.
The idea was to film a week later, but i got to my friend at Saturday evening to plan what we want to do and as i was going home around midnight the main actor was there, so we decided 5AM Sunday it is.
We were driving for about 30 minutes. Driving is always fun in thick fog at night. But at least there were no cars on the road.
Got on the spot early as the sun was still 30 minutes from rising. We scouted a bit and i got the drone ready. About 60 seconds in the air the drone just started dropping down with no way for me to control it. It bounced few times of the ground, shook the ice from props and got high enough for me to catch it :D
Well that didn't start great.
Well we got there, the drone was already on the tree for 30 days, it is almost 6 years old, so i was determent to film something. And if it does not survive, well it had a good run. But there was no way to keep it in air for more than 30-40 seconds. After the 4th crash we decided to just hold it :D
We had some cool shots in mind, with orbiting, going up into the fog, dropping from height of white to the character... But as we finished editing we talked about the end result and how it would probably be totally different if everything worked out as planed. There would be a lot more focus on flying, and 3 batteries on -4C can give you only a certain amount of time. I spent 2 batteries and i didn't even fly :D
Few weeks later i heard Roger Avary while talking with Joe Rogan and Quentin Tarantino about a scene that they changed completely as they could not film it because of weather conditions saying "sometimes if you can't do what you wanna do what you come up is better".
I know Dji drones have great stabilization. But i had no idea how good it is actually. After a while just holding the drone was almost impossible. At times my friend just laughed at me while my hands were shaking from cold. We start a scene, i hold the drone and 15-20 seconds later the hand just starts to shake so much that it is obvious from 20 meters away 😂
But you can't see it almost at all in the video. One thing it is not design to stabilize is the walking motion, and there were 2 scenes i whish i payed more attention, but it was filmed more as a moving from location to location so i didn't really pay attention to smooth walking.
Considering the light conditions, the fact this is the original Dji mini, with quite limited camera sensor and options I am pretty happy how the footage came out. It is not that great to watch on a big ass TV, but on the phone and a normal monitor it is decent.
And my friends inspiration was Béla Tarr and mine from the moment i saw that bumpy field was Stalker (the movie).
So is it a drone video if the drone does not fly? :D
