My buddy George has been flying drones —and using them to record video— pretty much since drones have been available for the consumer market. He has become quite proficient.
The video below –the work of Jack Dodson, a friend and client– is a fascinating look at the corn harvest (from combine to truck) on the Steck farm in the Missouri River Bottom near Jefferson City. The video was captured with the DJI Mavic 3 Pro Cine.
The virtual reality thing (as I understand it) hold no appeal for me. But I would be willing to strap on some goggles for a drones-eye-view of some interesting place. This is already a thing, yes?
My friend George recently got his hands on the DJI Avata, a pricey ($1388) little drone you fly with goggles and a joystick.
Reminiscent of William Gibson’s simstim. “…recorded sensoriums, like racing a black Fokker ground-effect plane across the Arizona mesa tops; diving the Truk Island preserves.”
My buddy George has been playing with drones for about eight years. (You can see some of his amazing video here, here and here.) In 2015 he got his drone snagged in a very tall tree while shooting some video of our place. So I was a little surprised when he agreed to come back and shoot some video of our recently expanded homestead.
As you might imagine, the technology has gotten a lot better in the last half dozen years and George has gotten even better at flying the things. The video below runs right at 2:30.
This was shot from an altitude of about 400 feet so the drone was just a black dot but the quality of the video was even better than what I’m streaming here.
I love trees. I love being surrounded by them. And I’ve tromped around our acreage over the years so I know there’s a bunch of them. But it took this birds eye view to give me a real sense of just how many trees surround us.
George Kopp and his friend Jack Dodson produced this beautiful bit of video. Jack was controlling the drone and George edited the video. I like the overhead shot (no sweeping zooms) and kept thinking of pen and ink drawings as I watched this.
Not exactly skimming the rooftops of Paris or zipping between Manhattan skyscrapers, but George Kopp was nice enough to bring his drone out to our place so here’s a minute of video he got before parking the drone in a tree top.
Earlier this week I posted video of the Missouri State Capitol, shot from a drone piloted by my friend George Kopp. There were some good questions in the comments so sat down with George a couple of days ago to get some answers. He’s been playing with quadcopters for the last year and a half and has learned a great deal. In this 18 minute chat he talks about the evolution of the devices; controls; fly aways; no-fly zones; pricing; flying times and range; and regulations.
Shot from DJI Inspire quadcopter by George Kopp.
Back in August +George Kopp invited me to tag along as he and Jack Dobson (along with Lorna Domke) shot some aerial video from Jack’s drone copter. George gave me the unedited video to play with. The piece above runs 2 min 30 sec.