GE AR . AERIAL FILMMAKING
First-person dynamics on Flow The spectacle of fast and manoeuvrable first-person drones can often arise from YouTube material featuring sports. The ski film Flow is a prime example. As filmmaker Maxime Moulin puts it: “Every year, skiers want to make a movie. It’s part of the culture – but last year was different. Resorts were closed, so we had to think a bit about the project. “The idea was to ski in Chamonix, [skier] Sam Favret’s home resort. We were mostly a group of five: Sam, mountain guide Jo, drone pilot Hensli Sage, photographer Fabian Bodet and me.” Working in winter 2021 at Chamonix and the Dolomites, the team were often waiting for weather. “Good snow isn’t here every day,” says Moulin. “There’s a few in four months that are good enough. “It’s a process,” he muses. “Every shooting day we have one or two shots that end up in the final cut.” Using the DJI Mavic 2 Pro, Inspire 2 and an FPV drone with a GoPro, Moulin had ReelSteady software for stabilisation in post. “It took four or five days for the grade, from finding the look to finalise everything.” Moulin’s approach sought a vibrancy he often misses in winter footage. “In most films, I don’t like that winter is usually a desaturated, blue, non-colourful grade. I’ve tried for years now to have a lot of colours. But, with only the white of the snow, blue of the sky, green of the forest.” The biggest challenge for pilot Sage, Moulin says, was carrying enough batteries for his aircraft up the mountain – and getting his hands warm enough to feel the joysticks!
the company covers a lot of bases, but Braben has sometimes found himself in situations where drones wouldn’t cut it. “There have been last-minute calls where they’ve tried to go with the drone and it hasn’t quite worked out. There can be a number of reasons: the helicopter goes faster, further, higher. Wind tends to be the biggest enemy of the drone. You could be sitting around for days waiting for the gusts to drop down. The helicopter has a much higher tolerance of wind.” Speaking in mid-February, Braben notes: “We’ve had crews down in south Georgia at the end of last year, we’ve been in Italy, Iceland, and are going to South America. It’s potentially a very global year for us.”
by what’s available. “We’ve had directors in the past, and their jaws are on the table. The technical progression over the last 15 years was slow, but the past two or three have jumped leaps and bounds.” If there’s a theme to the big international productions of early 2022, it’s snow – perhaps provoked by the need to begin a busy production season early in the year. “I’m sitting in the helicopter right now,” says Helicopter Film Services founder Jeremy Braben in Iceland, “because the heater’s on.” Braben echoes the general view: “We’ve seen an increase in helicopter use that we wouldn’t normally expect in January or February... there’s competition for our services that normally comes during the season, which is spring to autumn.” The company has often provided multi-camera arrays, intended to create very large and high-resolution resources for visual effects work, and increasingly with larger-format cameras generating even more pixels. “We’ve done a lot of arrays,” Braben recalls. “Three-camera and six-camera... we’re most often asked to use the Alexa Mini LF. That’s led to us updating our rigs to take Mini LFs, Red V-Raptors – and the new Sony Venice 2, which is an exciting development. It’s such a nice machine to shoot at night. Rob Hardy did a great demonstration film for the Sony launch, showing its extreme low-light capabilities.” With both helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles on offer,
OUT IN THE COLD DJI drones came in very handy in snowy conditions for the filming of Flow
54. DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
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