Rise Above To See The Whole Picture - Drone Video And Photography
We’ve all seen those moments in blockbuster Hollywood movies with the sweeping overhead shots of the epic mountain landscapes or the fast moving shots through the city buildings at night. These shots look amazingly impressive and provide that feeling of cinematic scale and high production values that you expect from these types of movies. In the past, these kinds of overhead shots required massive budgets, helicopters or huge cranes and the experienced pilots and camera operators to execute them. But things have changed and the type of impressive overhead film shots you expect from Hollywood are now achievable with the right video production team and equipment at a price and in timeframes that make this type of aerial photography much more accessible to businesses in Melbourne and beyond.
Aerial Drone Photography Services
We may not have a super cool helicopter and pilot (yet) but with our professional drone video and photography services, Team Creative can provide you with time and cost effective aerial imagery that will take your marketing film production to the level of a cinematic experience.
Perhaps you require our drone video services to clearly capture the unique and expansive landscapes of your tourism region, winery or farmland? Or maybe you need to show the extent of a real estate development, cover a major event, track over a large factory compound or present a stunning view of a new business precinct.
Whatever you might want to shoot from overhead, drone video will provide a birds eye view for your new and existing customers and allow you to better demonstrate and show off your product offering. Your aerial drone photos or video can be combined with other photos and video shot on ground and turned into valuable, impressive marketing material for use as TV advertisements, brand marketing videos, promotional YouTube and other social media content or videos and photos for your business website.
Tips for creating a professional drone video for your business
Team Creative have years of experience shooting on the ground footage and providing drone video production services. Over this time we have learned a few tricks to shooting better quality drone video content for business.
- Clever composition in drone photography and film is essential.
While it is important to compose a great picture whatever you are shooting, drone photography deserves special attention by the drone operator. This is because a drone’s ability to capture an entire landscape or scene with a wide angle lens can cause the audience’s eyes to be distracted by the detail and thus, important aspects of the scene can get lost.
An experienced Drone Operator and Director will set up and shoot with this understanding, using compositional rules such as Bakers Saddle and the Rule of Thirds (grid composition) to first select the best vantage point to capture an image from and then to showcase the important aspects in a focused way so that the brain doesn’t get distracted by a busy shot. Having a drone operator who is experienced in identifying this type of symmetry and pleasing aesthetic patterns is very helpful when producing drone aerial photography services.
- Try different types of creative shots but be aware of jumpy movements.
When flying over a scene capturing drone video it is important for the drone operator to have in mind their idea of the sweeping overhead shot they’d like to capture. Remember, your time is limited to all kinds of factors, including battery life. If a drone operator simply heads upwards with the drone to take the video without a clear idea of the direction of the shot, they are more likely to waste time and randomly move the camera around or change direction. When this happens a potentially good shot can be visually disrupted and the footage much harder to edit into an aesthetically pleasing film production. Having said that, one of the advantages of aerial drone photography is the creative flexibility it offers the operator. You can make all the same kinds of moves as a helicopter with a drone, so try them out. If you want to ‘reveal’ a scene, you can take your drone into reverse and fly backwards, gradually revealing the most impressive aspect of your image. Also remember to try sweeping shots low to the ground, moving between objects, as well as high above for a different compositional pattern and a wider view. Just make sure you are not flying higher than your local area regulations accept. Check on this before you fly.
- Technical details like shutter speed, frame rate, film definition and battery power are important.
Get your head around a few important areas of drone technology. Often, a change to the frame rate and shutter speed of your drone footage can change the way the footage works with other footage shot on the ground. Align your drone footage frame rate and shutter speed with any other footage being shot for the same edit with a different camera. If you don’t do this, the different frame rates in the shots will make smooth editing very difficult.
Higher frames per second (FPS) will generally allow you to slow down footage with 120 FPS offering great smooth slo mo shot options for your end film production. This is an excellent shooting frame rate if you are capturing action such as sports (surfing, racing, running) or shots of the faces of people and crowds from above such as you might find at a music festival.
The higher the definition of your drone footage, the more detail you can extract from a smaller area of the frame. This provides excellent editing opportunities in the edit suite. Even small areas of film can be blown up to full frame size in an edit without the loss of detail or degradation. Depending on the drone, you can shoot from 4K to 8K but for most drone video service providers for business, 4K is ample resolution to play with.
It might go without saying, but get to know your drone before you fly it. If you are unsure, do not operate it, especially over people where safety might become an issue! Related to this point – make sure you know your battery life, distance from operator and altitude limitations. You don’t want to lose it or have it drop out of the sky!
Team Creative are the team your business needs for all your professional drone video and photography services in Melbourne and beyond. We regularly travel to shoot too, so if you’re not a Melbourne business, chat to us anyway – we’d love to visit and shoot drone for you, wherever you are!
