Thursday, August 31, 2023

Fun with drones in the California countryside

Back in May I took a short trip over Memorial Day weekend to visit family back in California. This was the first time I'd been back since I starting drone flying last July, so I was looking forward to seeing some familiar places from the air. My brother Joel also has a drone (in fact he started flying before I did), so together with my other brother Jonathan we had some fun going drone flying together. After a session out in the countryside, as we were getting ready to come home I had the idea of following our car from the air (while driving slowly, on a deserted country road, with multiple people for extra situational awareness).

I've never operated from a moving vehicle before, and it was a fun experience practicing my cinematic moves trying to track the car while also riding in it. The full video was a bit too long to be interesting, but I extracted a few nice shots and put them together into the shorter version below. I'm especially proud of the bit near the end where, as we went under I-505, I managed to transition on the fly (literally!) from following mostly behind the car to instead tracking it from straight above. (I even left the ugly jerky animation bits in there which I've cut out from the rest of the video, just to show how it worked.)


Anyway, just a calm video of a relaxing drive through the countryside. (I've left out the parts where I almost ran into power lines…twice. It was fine.) And thanks to some recent system updates, I might have something new in a similar vein to show off pretty soon. A hui hou!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Think I said something interesting or insightful? Let me know what you thought! Or even just drop in and say "hi" once in a while - I always enjoy reading comments.