Can I Borrow Your Robot?
A good friend of mine asked me to shoot some drone video of her Church for an Easter service video. I wore a mask and we stayed apart, which was hard for me since I hadn't seen her for more than a month. I hadn't seen much of anyone in person for several weeks at this point. Neither of us entered the building. The only people who we saw were walking dogs and they stayed clear of us.
Since this was a reason to leave the house, I kinda brought everything. The drone was a Mavic 2 Zoom. I had my fuji with a 35mm and a canon with a 15mm and a 70-200, and I brought an instax. Ang made the mask for me out of some Japanese fabric she had picked up at an estate sale and hadn’t done anything with.
I’m lucky to be in a position where I can leave the house at all. This is such a strange time.
I also had my Zoom H5 with a borrowed Sony ECM-VG1 shotgun mic. I wanted to practice capturing sound from this environment. I didn't end up getting much because I brought the wrong set of fucking earbuds so I could only watch my levels. What I did get was with the shotgun pointed straight toward the park with my back to the church. You will hear some of it in the video below.
I just got the Zoom. I had one for my broadcast program when I was a teacher but we only used it for recording dialogue in studio. I never really learned how to use it properly.
The audio was mostly about practice, but I thought it might be nice for somebody who spent a lot of time at a place and was suddenly prevented from doing so might like to hear it. I don’t know.
I shot a lot of video so she would have enough to work with. I also shot stills because I always shoot stills.
The first image is from the war memorial park across the street from the church. I was flying from the other side of the park so I didn’t notice this until I was looking at the images in post, but someone had written “for what” in front of one of the memorial statues. Here it is cropped close. I wonder how long it’s been there.
Below is a cut of some of the drone video shot of the building. The sound you will hear is from my Zoom, plus some of the music I keep in a folder for our broadcasts and commercials. This upload is actually the second version. I normalized the ambient sound clips to -3db in this one and it just sounds better. Most drone video is silent, some of the newer ones don’t even have a microphone because all you hear is the sound of bees. I liked mixing in the ambient recording with the video because you expect to hear the propellers but can’t. It was an interesting sensation for me.
Video was shot flat with one of two LUTS applied in post, either SkyGrades Natural of SkyGrades Cinema-Pop. I don't have a set of ND filters for this drone so the only way to control exposure is shutter speed, which means it's all over the place. Most of this is crap. Flying conditions were ok. Wind 10-12mph with gusts up to 20, which is just my limit. You can see some of that in the video.
I had a second screen set up that I left on a bench so she could see what I was shooting and give a little direction.
Two more mistakes. I didn’t shoot anything specifically for my black and white areal series. I always need to look for that. I also didn’t get a portrait of Christine. I didn’t even use the long lens I had brought for that reason.