AERIAL LIGHTING TECHNIQUE
FLYING HIGH UPUP has used drones to provide lighting effects for commercials, including an Adidas campaign (above), and TV series such as Call My Agent Berlin (left)
Back then, drone work was just starting to go mainstream in filmmaking and Mandelbaum found himself seduced by this new perspective. “At that time, it wasn’t really common to have a camera that could move freely and be in places that were hard to reach; you could use a crane or a helicopter – but these things have their own limitations,” he explains. His bachelor’s thesis looked at demonstrating those limitations – exploring the kinds of shots that would have been impossible without drones. Experiments included a crane shot with a continuous dolly through the woods and a high-speed circle around an actor, travelling at around 90km per hour with a long lens, low to the ground. Over the years, he has kept looking for new ways to use drones, and lighting was a natural progression. The work of Daniel Riley – a US-based photographer thought to be one of the first to put a light on a drone – was a big inspiration. “The images he created were so fascinating and new, I wanted to do it immediately. I started placing orders for parts straight away,” recalls Mandelbaum. But where Riley’s effort was static on the drone, Mandelbaum wanted to take it even further – he wanted movement.
“I think we were the first to put it on a gimbal; the flight time was miserable, everything was super hard to work with,” he laughs. “But the effects were stunning.” Almost a decade on, you might think that advances in drone technology would have made aerial lighting more common. In fact, almost the opposite has happened, because the development of smaller, more accessible camera drones has reduced the need for the heavy-lift platforms that were once standard for getting an ALEXA or RED into the air. Mandelbaum says DJI’s game-changing Inspire 3 brought a big shift: “There’s so much stuff needed to fly the big drones and everything logistically is a nightmare. So these companies that used to have the heavy-lift drones that could also lift the lights, they’re now relying mostly on the Inspire and gave away all their heavy-lift stuff. It’s becoming rarer. Especially for us, we have more jobs with the LED drones than flying big cameras.” For a while, UPUP built its own lights, allowing them to optimise for weight and power, but it tended to set “alarm bells off on-set when we tell a production we come with our own-built LED source,” says Mandelbaum. “It causes
27
DEFINITIONMAGS
Powered by FlippingBook