Unmanned aerial vehicles surely facilitated many of our daily tasks. Today, we have Amazon Prime Air, a drone air delivery service, and CyberHawk, a drone-operated live inspection service. Both are a testament to how drones have been developed. Although drones have been used in various industries, their contribution has not yet reached its optimal potential. However, this may not be the case for cinematography and film production, an industry in which drones have become an immovable pillar of production in recent years.
In the age of multi-billion dollar blockbusters and CGI, getting exquisite shots on set is essential. Drones help film directors do exactly that. It’s fair to say that they have changed the way directors make movies. With the help of drones, today’s directors can take impossible shots. Modern drones are easy to operate. They’re simple enough for cinematographers familiar with remotes and joysticks to capture great shots. Drones made techniques like aerial and crane shots easy to perform if you are a good drone pilot. Especially since the cameras attached to the drones are equipped with three axes of stability, which almost guarantees a perfect shot, even if you are not such a good pilot.
The cinematic possibilities are great and the sky is the limit. Recently, in a Good Morning America segment, a company called DJI that makes drones for filmmaking showed drone footage of an erupting volcano in Iceland. Before the introduction of drones, that footage was nearly impossible to shoot. It was too risky for humans and too far away for satellites, which had neither the lens nor the angle to capture such unique images. The footage looked like a piece from a natural science documentary. It was of the same quality as the ground images filmed by the cameramen.
DJI, owned by Chinese drone lord Frank Wang, announced on April 17 the launch of the most powerful drone ever used in filmmaking, the Matrice 600. A short video was released online demonstrating just how powerful this new drone is. . The video showed a cinematographer filming a martial arts scene using the drone in Beijing. The new Matrice 600 is compatible with a wide range of attachable cameras. It enables professional videographers to use small DSLR cameras such as Canon, Panasonic, Black Magic, Sony, Nikon and large RED cameras as if they were handheld. The footage shown was spectacular, to say the least.
The Matrice 600 is just the beginning of a new line of powerful camera drones that is changing the very nature of cinema as we know it. Previously, big movie franchises like James Bond’s Skyfall and the Harry Potter series have used drones to film some famous scenes. With the success of these filming techniques, one can only hope that at some point flying drones and unmanned aerial vehicles will take over the entire cinematography, rendering the usual cameraman obsolete and reducing his role to a remote control possessor. . Fortunately for the film industry, directors are naturally little manipulators and learning new tricks always falls in the favor of the public.