Using drone shots for event promotion.
One of the greatest fits for a drone shoot often end up being scenes or situations with tons of movement, colours and visual contrasts.
As such, events like concerts or festivals can be promoted through unforgettable visuals from angles unfettered by the limits of gravity or camera boom arms. Physical constraints no longer get in the way of an awesome shot.
It is not just valuable as social media content of a recent event, but as a year-long promotional piece to help drive excitement and anticipation for the next upcoming event. It’s a future-proofing strategy, to stay on top of the competition with footage they dont have.
These types of shoots do require pre-production scouting and planning, were we inspect the venue (especially ceiling clutter and space availability) to ensure we can plan a great route and sequence before the time constraints of a live event is upon us.
Low light is often a challenge, especially for smaller FPV drones (which offer far more dynamic footage, and are way safer over people with their enclosed propellers). So collaborating closely with the venue to get a taste of the precise light level of the event before it begins, is again crucial.
You dont want to arrive at a once-a-year event only to end up with unusable high ISO footage!
In some cases, it may be required for the organizers to slightly raise the lights during a key shot moment.
As technology progresses though, low light capability in small drones continue to improve, but it is still not at the level of full sized cinema cameras due to the size and weight constraints. But in every case, the uniqueness of the perspective far outweighs the challenges.
Once we got the perfect shot, then what?
After the shoot, one thing often overlooked is audio, and audio is extremely important. Since drones cannot easily capture audio onboard (putting a microphone right next to 4 angry propellers rarely yields pleasant results), we must innovate.
A crewmember will often do a walk-around of the venue or event with a separate microphone to capture ambient sounds or the cheers from the crowd, then mix this into the footage.
One day perhaps noise cancellation will be good enough to filter out prop noise so this isnt needed, but for now this separate process is required and important to remember.
When it gets time to publish, once again it is not only of value for driving engagement and nostalgia for the people recently attending said event, it is also a brilliant tool in the back pocket for the organizers to use all year round for promotion of future events.
Just remember, if your content has awesome dynamic perspectives that your competitors dont have, you capture their attention first.
