Cinema and aerial footage: the 3 reasons for a new love affair

New expressive frontiers for directors, especially the younger ones

You don't need The Great Beauty, fresh from its Academy Award for best foreign film, to tell us how much innovation and refinement in aerial photography and filming techniques can influence the artistic and expressive success of a film.

As is also evident from the book Drone Art: Baltimore Paperback by Terry Kilby and Belinda Kilby, in just a few years drones, after serving a mainly military purpose, have made an enormous contribution to the civil sector and then quickly and lightly lent themselves to the world of art. In fact, these easy-to-handle aircraft can combine spectacular images, great stability and previously unthinkable creative opportunities, at very low costs compared with the common technologies of film and photographic art of the past.

Let's see how together...

1 - Engineering lends art new ideas

Art has always been made of innovation and draws on every field of knowledge.
Drones are a significant loan from the field of engineering. Although these seem like two opposite territories, creativity has led several filmmakers to use these lightweight radio-controlled aircraft for some scenes of their films, adding the so-called 'third dimension' to the shot.
Furthermore, ground control makes it possible to orient the camera to perform 360-degree pans with a tilt from zero (frontal shot) to 90 degrees (vertical shot), offering endless possibilities of camera movement, not only for panoramic scenes but also for those with one or more actors to follow.

This is possible because drones, even small ones like the Drone Hunter, can follow the scene along a path where tracks and dollies cannot be used, or shoot from angles that are difficult to achieve with traditional systems.

2 - Technology democratizes art

Those just mentioned are only some of the traditional systems for shooting not only aerial but also dynamic footage which, together with helicopters and civil aircraft or even cranes and jibs, make it possible to achieve shots widely used in filmmaking, but at very significant costs, compared with which drones become simple and highly competitive alternatives.

A small production company, perhaps a start-up just founded by a group of young reporters or filmmakers, can hardly bear such demanding costs. Having a simple drone among its working equipment makes it possible to shoot not only aerial footage but also particularly long sequence shots (like those of Joe Wright, which last up to five minutes, giving his films very strong emotional intensity).

The usefulness of a drone among the tools of new-generation directors is confirmed, to give a recent example, by the wonderful aerial shots in Virzì's film 'Capitale Umano' (Human Capital), filmed by a start-up of young filmmakers.

3 - Even Hollywood gets it…

Hollywood too has noticed that technology democratizes art, since the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has asked the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for permission to use drones not only for minor and supporting scenes in big blockbusters, but also for more demanding sequences without running the risk of violating local rules. At the moment the FAA is planning to grant the first licenses to the major production companies as early as 2015.

These new operational capabilities are now flowing into the landscape of major-release films, but they have already been tested for several years by young directors and camera operators who, whether for cost reasons or because they truly knew how to anticipate the times, have become pioneers of a new frontier.

Every great beauty is more beautiful if you can see it from above.
See life from above.