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Introducing the Flying Robot International Film Festival

I recently opened the doors on a new project I’ve been working on. FRiFF or the Flying Robot international Film Festival is a film festival focused on short form cinema created from the perspective of flying cameras. You know, drones.

FRiFF Logo
The Flying Robot International Film Festival takes off.

I had the idea for a drone film festival after witnessing the rise of so much epic aerial filmmaking over the past few years. Now that consumer camera drones are readily available and fairly inexpensive, we’re seeing a huge uptick in aerial cinema on YouTube and Vimeo. I want to highlight the best stuff out there and really encourage filmmakers to take it to the next level.

There are six categories of films that we are accepting submissions for. Breathtaking aerial cinematography of exotic landscapes and sunsets will always be mesmerizing. Combine that with a decent story and you’re a good candidate for the Cinematic category.

In the Drones for Good category, we will highlight projects that use drones for the betterment of humanity. There are a growing number of examples of drones being used for good, such as the Syrian Airlift Project, which sends drones over the border to war-torn Syria to drop off medical supplies. Conservation Drones use fixed-wing drones to protect forests and monitor endangered wildlife.

FRiFFest
A flying camera drone at an abandoned NSA listening post in Berlin.

Aerial sports is an area that’s really taken the world by storm. FPV racing and aerial head-to-head drone dogfighting films will do well in the Aerial Sports category. The Aerial Sports League and the US Drone National Championships are two organizations that have brought in large numbers of participants and spectators. Just watching an FPV race from the perspective of a racer quad is mind blowing.

I Made That! is a natural category as there are many maker dads and hacker pilots building their own flying robotic contraptions. Films that depict these creative works are very welcome.

WTF LOL is meant to highlight the hilarious and the ridiculous. It’s one of those things that you know when you see it.

Student Films, because our kids are our future. This category is free to enter until the regular deadline (the other categories are $5-10 per entry).

Winners in all six categories as well as a “best in show” winner, as determined by our panel of esteemed judges, will receive valuable prizes in the form of flying robots, cameras and accessories. The festival will culminate in screenings and an awards ceremony in early November in San Francisco.

If you’ve been making drone videos or just starting out, I highly encourage you to submit your best work and maybe you’ll fly away with a new robotic friend.

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Aerial Tour of the Port of Oakland

Take a 3 minute tour of the Port of Oakland, the fifth busiest container shipping terminal in the US. Things to see: Big cranes! Big ships! Lots of containers! Be sure to click the gear icon to watch in full 4K glory.

I shot this while on a walking tour of the Port in support of the The Container Guide by Tim Hwang and Craig Cannon. Flying camera used was a DJI Phantom 3 Professional.

Of course, any self-respecting walking tour with a drone requires a dronie.

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Drone Highlights of 2014

A lot has happened in my drone world this past year, though I really haven’t made much mention of it here. A quick recap of  some of the highlights:

  • In February, I acquired a 3D Robotics IRIS, a fun ready-to-fly quadcopter with autonomous flight capabilities.  I shot this fire aftermath video soon after.
  • Built my first quadcopter in April and participated in the Game of Drones – Aerial Action Sports League competitions at the Bay Area Maker Faire in May. Didn’t win any battles, but did hang out in the net a good bit.
First Drone Build: Von Drone California Special
  • Presented at dorkbotSF about my drone build and Game of Drones Maker Faire experience.
  • Shot a few dronies with friends using the 3D Robotics IRIS and a new DJI Phantom 2 Vision+.
  • Built a FPV 250 racing quadcopter. Needs a bit of tweaking and more air time, but she flies.
Second Drone Build: Turtle 250 FPV Racer Quad
  • Built a quadcopter based on the Game of Drones Hiro “indestructible” airframe.
My build of the Game of Drones Hiro "indestructible" airframe.
Third Drone Build: Game of Drones Hiro “indestructible” Airframe.
  • Shot a ton of aerial videos in exotic locales that are in the ever growing edit queue.  Soon, really!

Media Coverage

I can only imagine what 2015 has in store for our drone future.

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Why I’m Giving up on Creative Commons on YouTube

CC HeartI’ve been a long-time supporter of Creative Commons content licensing, which facilitates the proliferation of art and culture through sharing. On Flickr, I license the majority of my photos CC BY-NC-SA. It’s a good implementation and I’m happy to support people using my stuff non-commercially as I have other artists’ works.

Not so on YouTube. I recently came across this opportunistic individual who took my drone video of Burning Man 2013 and reposted it in its entirety to YouTube under the inaccurate and misleading title “Drone’s Eye View of Burning Man 2014.” A few issues here.

1. It’s not a video from 2014. This guy just reposted my 2013 video using a very SEO friendly title, as apparently a lot of people are searching for Burning Man 2014 drone videos. Google is happy to send people his way.

2. He’s monetized my video, I have not. I explicitly chose not to monetize the video as I was abiding by Burning Man’s noncommercial ethos. At almost 100k views, this guy is surely profiting.

3. There’s not much I can do about it.

The reason I can’t do anything about is I originally licensed my video CC BY, YouTube’s only Creative Commons license option.  CC BY means that a user can do whatever they want with it, just as long as they give proper attribution to the creator (more on that later).  Commercial use is allowed, which YouTube makes very easy by letting the resulting video be monetized with ads. Combine that with an SEO friendly, yet inaccurate and misleading title, and PROFIT!

YT Licenses

I never expected that someone would repost the video in its entirety and monetize tons of views from it, or that YouTube would make this so easy.

The intention of CC licenses, as I’ve always believed, is to grease the wheels of culture. To create a repository of creative work that can be drawn upon to make new creative works. There are a handful of different Creative Commons license options that allow a creator to decide how they wish their works to be used. I generally go with CC BY-NC-SA which stands for “By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike.” By using this license I’m stating that you are welcome to use my works non-commercially in your own work as long as you properly attribute it to me and share the resulting work in the same manner. If you want to use my works commercially, you are welcome to contact me and see if I’m open to a deal. Otherwise, there is no need to get my permission as long as you adhere to these terms.

The real issue is YouTube’s remix tool is horribly broken. Of the 68 videos that users have “remixed” from my video, 36 are wholesale reposts of my entire video (many of which are monetized with ads). 28 are by accounts that have since been deleted by YouTube for various TOS violations and a whopping THREE are actual original new works in which a sample of my video appears.

YouTube Videos Using This Content

How YouTube fulfills CC’s attribution requirement is also broken. CC BY license stipulates, “If supplied, you must provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material.”  To find this info on YouTube, you must go a video’s landing page and first click the “SHOW MORE” text in the description below the video. Here the Creative Commons Attribution license with link is clearly displayed. Below this, there’s a “View attributions” link which needs to be clicked to discover the original author’s credit and source video link. There’s no way the average YouTube user is going to go through these steps to learn what they are viewing was partially or wholly created by someone else. 

Drone_s_eye_view_of_Burning_Man_2014_-_YouTube_1

2nd click

It’s really unfortunate that YouTube doesn’t offer different flavors of CC licenses like Flickr has been doing for years. Had BY NC been an option, monetization could be prevented. I guess it’s not in YouTube’s interest to offer video hosting for videos that can never be monetized.

As long as YouTube’s CC implementation is broken, I will not participate in it. I’ve rolled back the CC licenses on 35 of my videos to YouTube’s Standard license. Not ideal, but at least I have some recourse if someone now tries to profit from my videos.

It’s a real bummer as Creative Commons is a great resource for source material for making art and furthering remix culture. I really hope YouTube cares enough to get it right.

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Top 10 Favorite Drone Videos of 2013

2013 has been quite the year for the proliferation of flying robots with high definition cameras. For less than $1000, it’s now possible to put together your own stabilized flying camera rig. This has resulted in many early adopters going down the rabbit hole, like I have, in building or acquiring their own rigs. Here are ten of my favorite videos shot from the drone’s perspective in 2013.

I’ll start off with the OGs of the FPV (first person view) UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) scene, Team BlackSheep’s own 2013 retrospective video of their work. Team BlackSheep is a European based collective of “R/C daredevil” hackers and pilots. These guys specialize in building and flying multirotor and fixed-wing RC aircraft.  TBS has been very active this past year, capturing epic footage all over the world as is obvious in their retrospective. One of my  favorites in this montage, is the renegade Costa Concordia wrecked cruise ship flyover.

Over the summer, police tried to supress a demonstration at Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey. This is the first aerial riot footage I can remember seeing from a drone and it’s an amazing point of view. Riot police with water canons and tear gas take on the demonstrators. Also notable is that the Phantom used to capture this footage, was eventually shot down by police. You can see that perspective as well.

Here’s one vision of a dystopian drone future.

Pal and fellow Phantom owner Nate Bolt, got permission to fly his rig inside the historic New York Public Library in NYC. Such classic. So spacious. Wow.

A top 10 list isn’t complete without a Burning Man video. This one by Ziv captures the morning light nicely as Truth in Beauty awakens.

You’ve likely seen this one already. This is an example of what happens when bad piloting and weddings mix. Don’t be this guy.

This Niagara Falls video is pretty epic. It got me super interested in the possibilities.

Eric Cheng’s aerial footage of surfers at Steamer’s Lane in Santa Cruz really illustrates the beauty of the Northern California coast.

Morning at the Santa Monica pier. I love the precision of this pilot’s chosen flight path. He has balls.

This video by my pal Nate is what finally got me to pull the trigger and invest in my first flying robot. It’s short, simple and poetic. Also, slo-mo. Who doesn’t love good slo-mo?

If you like these, I’ve got a YouTube playlist going of aerial favorites as I discover them. Feel free to subscribe and follow along. Happy New Year and may your 2014 be filled with peaceful, unarmed, non-surveillance drones!