How to Film with a Drone -10 Tips

How to Film with a Drone – Aerial filming and cinematic drone shots can bring a huge amount of production value to your video content. Here are some tips for anyone thinking about flying a drone.

1. It’s much easier to fly drones in open spaces. That sounds obvious but it’s an important point. You could be tempted to fly a drone over water but what happens when you need to bring the drone back? If trees surround you and there isn’t a wide enough clearing it can become a serious issue…especially when the battery warning light starts to flash and the stakes are raised!
2. Lighting. The camera can’t handle great areas of contrast. So if you have the sun in shot and a dark hillside, the shot will be worthless since you wont be able to get a good exposure for both parts of the frame. On the flipside be careful not to have the sun directly behind you since you will risk bringing the shadow of the drone into your shot. So make sure you check the sun path when you are location scouting and choose your location based on the position of the sun for the shot you want to get. Of course if you wait until the sun is very low in the sky then you’ll be able to get a balanced exposure and achieve that magic hour moment.
3. Battery. The battery only lasts for around 20 minutes flight time. So its best to plan out your shot and check the first take. Then you can get up again and make multiple takes. Remember too that the battery will run out long before a 16GB memory card so you might as well record the whole flight time as you never know what part of the shot may be used in the final edit. Sometimes the best shots happen accidently and before or after we call ‘action’.
4. Check the rules for drone flying use. If you are making money from the shots you’ll need a license. For anything else you can generally fly wherever you want except for airports. Search for drone regulations UK.
5. Settings. Here are the settings that we like to use on the DJI Phantom Pro 4

   

6. Getting a good shot. The typical shot is to fly up high and get a moving landscape type shot. But why not try some different cinematic approaches:

• Bird’s eye view or top shot – this is a very cinematic choice and typified by the Cohen Brothers movies.
• Tracking shot, Why not use the longer lens option and get in close to your subject for really easy to set up and impressive dolly or driving type shots
• Crane shot – as the car pulls away the camera jibs up vertically. Again, to do this with a crane costs a fortune so to grab this with the drone adds huge production value and is again a very cinematic stylistic choice.

7. Why use the drone? Because not most of us can not fly! So what the drone presents us with is the option of having another point of view and a new perspective on familiar subject matter.
8. Movement. One often-overlooked style choice with the drone is the simple fact that the camera does not need to move. You can have a perfectly locked off top shot 100ft up in the sky. And sometimes less really is more. Sometimes having a locked off shot allows you to appreciate the movement within the frame itself and this can carry great emotive and storytelling significance.
9. Look to movies to understand when and where the drone shot can be used. If the wider location is important to the scene, for example the hero is alone in an empty wilderness, then getting up high would be the best way of showing that. Or we use it to introduce our setting for the simple reason that we can see more if we go up. One of the basic principles of cinema is to follow the character, so in movies if the subject is flying then you need to fly with him. Or it can be used to link scenes together or to show of the scale of a given set or situation.
10. Overkill. Use the drone to supplement your story and make sure the shots are purposeful and not just for the sake of it. We can look at many movies to see how the drone shot can be used as a story telling tool. The drone is a specific tool that can allow us to improve our films if we use it at the right time and in the right way.