UAVs surely made many of our daily tasks easier. Today, we have Amazon Prime Air, a drone-powered aerial delivery service, and CyberHawk, a drone-operated live inspection service. Both are a testament to just how developed drones have become. Although drones have been used in various industries, their contribution has not yet reached its full potential. However, this may not be the case in 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, it is essential to get exquisite shots during filming. Drones help movie directors do just that. It’s fair to say that they have changed the way directors shoot movies. With the help of drones, directors today can shoot impossible shots. Modern drones are easy to operate. They’re simple enough for cinematographers familiar with remote controls and joysticks to capture great shots. Drones made techniques like overhead and crane shots easily doable if you’re a good drone pilot. Especially since the cameras attached to the drones are equipped with three-axis stability, which almost guarantees a perfect shot, even if you’re not such a good pilot.
The cinematic possibilities are vast and the sky is the limit. Recently, in a segment on Good Morning America, a company called DJI that makes drones for film making showed drone footage of an erupting volcano in Iceland. Before the introduction of drones, it was almost impossible to take these types of images. 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 ground footage shot by cameramen.
DJI, owned by Chinese drone overlord Frank Wang, announced on April 17 the launch of the most powerful drone ever used in cinema, the Matrice 600. A short video was posted 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 allows professional videographers to use small DSLR cameras like Canon, Panasonic, Black Magic, Sony, Nikon and large RED cameras as if they were laptops. 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 UAVs will completely take over motion picture cinematography, rendering the usual cameraman obsolete and reducing the role of him to a possessor of a remote control. Fortunately for the movie industry, directors are experts by nature and learning new tricks always falls in favor of the audience.