Droning a Drummer

The past couple of weeks I've met up with a good mate of mine to look at possibly working together on some exciting projects. Joe Clegg is an awesome drummer, musician and musical director and has worked with some massive names in the industry and tours the world whilst performing and utilising his skill set of musical direction, drumming and pushing technology in his field of expertise.

We arranged a coffee to chat through the projects that he has in mind and this week we got the drone out, in the form of my Phantom 4, to take some test shots and see how his studio looked from above.

After a bit of flying around the first room I'd got my eye in and got over the nervousness of flying indoors! In fairness, I get nervous every time I fly. Not in a scared way, but more in a responsible way. I'm very aware of the damage that these awesome things can do, I think that it's a healthy respect that hopefully will mean that I'm always aware of the environments that I'm flying in and the people around me. There's also the added concords when flying inside. You can't see it in any of these shots but the is a truss rig hanging from both ceilings in these rooms with lights hanging from them, so I needed to be very aware of them and my drone position around them, but at the same time looking at the screen to get the shots right!

Anyway, we were then talking about how we can move around the studio and Joe asked if I could fly through an open door! It was pretty tight!

We then got into his drum studio and started to have a play with some of the perspectives,

Including a round window a couple of meters up

Anyway, after a little time of messing around in the space Joe suggested that we go for something to introduce the studio and space so we came up with a quick shot starting outside the studio and following Joe into the room where he sits at his drums. The idea was then to rise up above him as he started to drum and then be able to reveal some of the room in the process. We originally did this as one shot, but then after picking up some B roll footage we decided to get one with him walking into shot. This meant that I could start the drone height at a much lower level above where he would take his seat, to then rise from there. This worked much better, although the down draught from the props did play havoc with his hair!

Here's the final video that Joe layered with some drum samples from Sound Gas on Basecamp - https://soundgas.bandcamp.com