Sussex drone filming
Experience Mid Sussex is a collection of fantastic hotels, attractions and venues in mid Sussex. They approached us as they wanted to produce an aerial overview of 10 of their locations. It was a great opportunity and we jumped at the chance because you can’t beat filming some stunning listed buildings, beautiful gardens, steam trains and vineyards from the air with a drone.
Planning an aerial shoot
When drones are involved there is inevitably going to be a lot of planning to do but this project took that to the next level. Each location needed a shot plan, site survey and recce to ensure that we could capture the best shots. Each location had a shot plan that included 6 shots we definitely needed and we then allowed a little more time to capture shots that jumped out at us, we do this because it can be tricky to know exactly what to film as drones offer such a unique point of view. We wanted to try and stay away from capturing to many ultra-wide shots because they have been captured to death by hobbyist drone pilots. To do this we ensured that we factored in time for lens changes so we could capture shots at different focal lengths. This had a huge impact on the final films and allowed is to create more interesting sequences in the edit process. Site surveys are made up of health and
safety information, this is to ensure that we are fully compliant all of the time. Because all of the locations are open to the public we generally tried to film during closed hours, this made it a lot safer for the location and a lot easier for us. In some of the videos people do feature, for these shots everyone knew what has going on and we maintained a safe distance from them.
There were many advantages to working on this project but whilst I’m talking about the organisation of the project it’s worth mentioning this. Because the locations owned a lot of land around the main feature(s) of the video we didn’t need to seek any permission from third party land owners, this was a bonus and is one of the reasons why this project ran so smoothly and allowed us to capture such a broad range of beautiful shots.
Good ol’ British weather
One of our biggest issues was the weather! For a shoot that mainly took place in August we were very unlucky, we had to reschedule quite a few of the shoots because it was either too windy or it was raining, rain and drones do not mix! I think the main reason it affected us was because we had so many locations to film and we didn’t have a huge amount of time at each location so any hold-ups were going to affect us more than usual.
Drone filming highlights
A particular highlight was filming at the Bluebell Railway because steam engines are fantastic and have a real presence on film. We were lucky enough to be taken down the track so we could capture one of their main stream engines leaving the station. The shot below shows the engine pulling away in a cloud of steam and as it continues the stream slowly clears to reveal the majestic BR Standard, No.73082 “Camelot”.
As well as steam locomotives we also filmed some beautiful gardens and hotels, below are two of my highlights. First we have Borde Hill Garden which features a beautiful rose garden and secondly we have Gravetye Manor which is a country hotel. The manor house was built in 1598 and now features a Michelin star and stunning gardens.
Borde Hill Garden
Gravetye Manor
As I’m sure you can see, aerial footage really does have the wow factor and it’s more important than ever to stand-out from the crowd. We truly believe that aerial filming from drones or even helicopters can add a huge amount to a promotional or corporate video. Here is the a link to the aerial promo we produced for Experience Mid Sussex.
If you are interested in aerial filming or photography and would like to find out more about how we could help you please contact Will or Andy on 01273 911345.