Aerial cinematography has become part of film fabric – but why? We track down the operators to discuss life behind drones, and the effects of constantly seeing ourselves from above.
Spelterini Pyramids, from a balloon, 1904
In 1909, Filippo Marinetti addressed his ‘futurist poets’, describing how he ‘was able to break apart the old shackles of logic and plumb lines of the ancient way of thinking.’ How? By looking at objects ‘from a new point of view, no longer head on or from behind, but straight down, foreshortened, that is’. Imagine how many shackles and plumb lines Marinetti would be breaking if he were living through the current drone boom.
Aerial cinematography is suddenly everywhere. “We’ve seen a huge increase in demand over the last few years,” says director of photography (DoP) and drone operator at CloudVisual, Will Harford. He said this “is thanks to the snowball effect of drones being used in productions and the boom in consumer drones which are easy to fly and can take some fantastic shots.”
These days, it’s more of a shock when a documentary doesn’t employ establishing shots that glide over landscapes high above, looking ‘straight down, foreshortened’. The drone shot is now cinematic bread and butter. DoP and drone operator Ben Hoy-Slot very much agrees with that. “The ‘drone shot’, as you put it, has become a huge kind of part of many productions. And it’s become an expectation, I think, as well.’
ArrayLawrence George, San Francisco Earthquake from a kite
Above
In true crime documentaries, cameras linger above quarries and scrub, fields and scrapyards, prompting you to wonder where the bodies are buried beneath. Meanwhile, 2012’s Skyfall was one of the first films to employ drones in sweeping action scenes. More imaginatively, in 2015’s Jurassic World, a drone mimics a pterosaur attacking a crowd of people. Drones drift by the scuzzy skyscrapers of pulp fiction as readily as they advertise the heights of luxury in Dubai.
“Aerial shots have historically been reserved for only the biggest of budgets for film and productions,” Will explains, “so the introduction of affordable aerial imagery and film using drones has created an opportunity for directors and content creators to get the aerial shots they would never have been able to afford.”
A Leonardo da Vinci sketch of a drone (Courtesy of the Torre do Tombo National Archive)
Beyond moving cameras, drones now shift medicine, post, packages, pizzas – and, of course, bombs. For the poet Andrea Brady, “drones are the most conspicuous mechanism of American necropolitics, which Achille Mbembe defines as the sovereign power to dictate who may live and who must die.”
Those connotations of warfare and surveillance go right back to the first imagining of a drone – a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci in the early 1500s, which he completed while he was working as a military engineer. Cesare Borgia, commander of the Pope’s army, took on Leonardo as his chief military advisor, catalysing Leonardo’s obsession with flying machines. As well as many sketches, Leonardo is sometimes credited with drawing the first directly overhead map of a city. All very useful for Borgia’s fight for power.
Watching
World War I saw Leonardo’s vision articulated, when reconnaissance aircraft were equipped with cameras to record enemy movements and defences. Hollywood was relatively quick to adopt the technology and a striking amount of aerial photography was used for war films (see the timeless dogfight in 1927’s Wings).
Likewise, in the mid-2000s, camera-equipped flying robots were in the headlines, to boast of America’s capture of Bin Laden. It wasn’t until the mid-2010s that national aviation authorities started to permit the commercial use of drones. As such, it’s only very recently that drone cinematography’s air of vague threat has been diluted and aerial shots have become ambient, even soothing and unremarkable. Now, filmmakers use drones for a full range of effects.
“Viewers need to be taken on a storytelling journey and aerial shots can help describe a scene, add depth to a story or build on a location to enhance the storyline,” Will explains. Ben, who’s likewise a DoP first and a drone pilot second, adds “I’m always trying to achieve the shot that’s required to tell the story.”
Still from Land of Steel
Land Of Steel is a short film – a “vignette documentary” Ben says of the project (directed by Chris Thomas) – which follows a 70-year-old resident of Port Talbot called John as he runs through the industrial landscape. Drones glide in a navy-blue dusk capturing the last gasps of smoke issuing from semi-dormant blast furnaces.
The aerial shots “work in tandem with the character and the plot’, Ben notes. The film captures the uncertainty of the Welsh steel industry, which comes to stand in for John’s own precarity and vice versa. The way the camera hovers over indifferent motorways and the way we look straight down on an ant-size John only serves to heighten the question of where this former ‘man of steel’ now stands in a broader context.
The centre of New York, 1932
Soaring
While the future of Welsh steel might be shaky, aerial cinematography’s prognosis looks very healthy indeed. As technology continues to improve and regulatory hurdles ease, it’s entirely feasible that most cinematographers will keep their flying cameras right next to their lens kits. But why are we humans so infatuated with these non-human perspectives?
Says Will, “I think it’s fair to say that most people would dream of flying and [aerial shots] can sometimes create that effect.” That, and many more dreams open up besides. Ben mentioned a one-and-a-half-minute film called Right Up Your Alley that went viral recently. It’s a ‘one shot of a drone flying through this bowling alley, all the way through, into the pins and through the system’ – a first person view achieved with a smaller drone and a Go-Pro.
The film’s racked up millions of views, and its maker Jay Christensen – who scored himself an invite to watch Guardians Of The Galaxy Part III being made as a result – has attributed its viral success to the fact that “a drone can move through cracks and crevices to tell a story.”
But what story would that be exactly? The overheard snatches of conversation as the camera swoops by bowlers? The story of a vintage building in Minneapolis? A rallying cry to support local businesses impacted by the pandemic?
Or might the story be far more ancient? How humans continue to overextend, now that the sky is no longer the limit? How we long to see things previously inaccessible to the human eye? In doing so, even momentarily, we shuck off the old shackles of logic and are allowed to see ourselves anew.
Will Harford is Director of Photography and drone operator at CloudVisual
@cloudvisual | cloudvisual.co.uk
–
Ben Hoy-Slot is Director of Photography and drone operator at Hydra Films
@benhoyslot | @hydra__films | https://hydrafilms.co.uk/
