I was back on the east coast for the holidays visiting family and friends. I brought the new DJI Mavic Pro with me (fantastic little drone btw, best one yet) while visiting Richmond, Virginia. The mighty James River runs through this historic city, a perfect place for capturing some aerials. This short aerial film was shot during the closing days of 2016 during an especially magical golden hour.
(originally published on Medium on 12/31/16)
I launched the Flying Robot international Film Festival, the first international drone film festival, in 2015. FRiFF is a drone shorts festival focused on fantastic aerial cinematography, storytelling and the positive uses of drones. By many measures, the inaugural festival was a success. We received over 150 entries from 35 countries across 7 categories. We screened 20 selections and awarded prizes to 14 winners valued at over $10k. A number of well known drone industry companies and startups stepped up as sponsors. We sold out two screenings in San Francisco and took the inaugural program on the road to Australia, Indonesia and the Netherlands earlier this year.
Year two of FRiFF premiered November 17th this year, again in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater. More entries from more countries flooded in as the bar in quality and variety continued to elevate. New this year, we added the first ever Flying Robot Aerial Imagery Day. This all day event consisted of a series of presentations, talks and workshops on all things drone based aerial imagery. While not as well attended as I had hoped, the caliber and diversity of presentations were stellar. Plenty of lessons learned for next year.
Something that doesn’t get a lot of ink in the hype around drones are their humanitarian potential. Drones are being used to deliver life saving medicine and blood to rural villages in Rwanda, to prevent poaching of endangered rhinos and elephants and to save the rainforests of indigenous lands in Panama. We have a Drones for Good category in FRiFF specifically for highlighting these vital stories.
The Federal Aviation Administration oversees manned and unmanned aircraft regulations in the US. The FAA released their long awaited Small UAS Rule regarding commercial drone operations on August 29th, creating a path for drone pilots to legally become certified to fly for commercial purposes.
I soon decided to become certified as a Remote Pilot by taking the remote pilot certificate exam. It wasn’t very hard but did take a bit of studying. If you’re interested in getting certified for commercial operations, I recommend this resource put together by 3DR.
Now that I’m Part 107 certified, I’m able to do aerial drone work-for-hire. I did a fair bit this year, primarily capturing aerial footage for creative production companies and architecture firms. I plan to do more of this in 2017, as well as providing consulting services around commercial drone applications.
Drone innovation is accelerating at a breakneck pace. For something that’s really only been a viable option for little more than 3 years, it’s crazy insane how far things have progressed. In 2013, a quadcopter drone could barely find its own way home. Now consumer drones can capture buttery smooth 4k imagery, see objects around them, avoid or track them, fly repeatable mission paths, stay aloft much longer and can almost fit in your pocket.
Of course, drones are used for more than just capturing incredible photos and video. The commercial applications of drones are numerous. DroneDeploy is a well-funded startup that provides cloud-based photogrammetry services (3D maps and models created from aerial photos) for industries such as construction, agriculture, industrial inspection and mining. Their services are made to work with any drone, though it couldn’t be any simpler with those made by DJI. DroneDeploy just closed $20m in a Series B round this past August, adding rocket fuel to their efforts.
This December in San Francisco, Chinese drone maker DJI hosted DJI Airworks, their first ever enterprise drone conference. This event focused on industrial applications of drones across an array of industries. DJI brought together service providers, startup companies and early adopters who are pushing the envelope of what’s possible with drones in agriculture, public safety, construction and inspection. Commercial drones are projected to be a $127 billion market by 2020. This is not a bad horse to hitch your air wagon to.
FPV (first person view) drone racing is the adrenaline junky side of drones. It’s easy to see why this sport is so addictive and captures the imagination. I’ve built a couple drones for racing but readily admit my stick game isn’t nearly as good as the 20-somethings who live and breath this stuff on a daily basis. YouTube is chock full of masterful FPV racers & freestyle flyers doing their thing. Some recommendations: Rotor Riot, Mr Steele, Skitzo FPV, Zoe FPV, Vondrone, Aerial Sports League. Big money has already arrived in the FPV world. Top racers are being sponsored and flown to tournaments around the globe. This will only grow as more people discover this new sport.
2017 will continue to be interesting and innovative as drones become more accepted and commonplace in business, humanitarian work, art and leisure. I, for one, welcome our flying robotic overloads.
I am excited to announce that the second annual Flying Robot international Film Festival is now accepting submissions for the 2016 festival. Drone filmmakers, builders and racers of every stripe are encouraged to submit their short films in the world’s premiere international drone film festival. There are 8 categories this year: Epic Landscape, Cinematic Narrative, Drones For Good, I Made That!, Promotional, FPV Racing/Aerial Sports, WTF LOL and Student Film. Something for everyone.
Our 2015 inaugural festival attracted 153 submissions across 7 categories representing 35 countries. We awarded over $10,000 in cash and prizes to winning films in all categories. We are doing the same this year.
Submissions deadline is September 15th, so there’s plenty of time to get your drone masterpiece in! Check the FRiFF site for all the details.
Today marks the launch of Star Simpson’s Circuit Classics crowdfunding campaign, which aims to bring Forrest Mims’ vintage hand-drawn circuit designs to life.
Anyone who has grown up in the Radio Shack era of electronics will instantly recognize Forrest Mims’ hand lettered book, Getting Started in Electronics. Star took three of Mims’ popular designs and is bringing them to life as electronic kits with Mims’ circuit diagrams rendered as lovely, functional circuit boards.
Star approached us to create the campaign video for her project, which we were extremely excited to take on. Not only is this such a cool project, but it gave us the opportunity to come up with creative ways to present Star and her work in the video. The design of the circuit boards, Mims’ books and the workbench setting all lent themselves to visually rich possibilities. Have a look at the video and see if you agree.
The inaugural Flying Robot international Film Festival took place last night at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. As the festival director, I couldn’t be more pleased. We received 153 submissions representing 35 countries across 7 categories. We gave away over $10,000 in cash and prizes and we sold out our first screening. We had a number of awesome sponsors participating who donated drones and drone related prizes. A huge THANK YOU to all the filmmakers who submitted, the sponsors who donated, the volunteers who toiled away to make all the events a success and of course, everyone who showed up to be a part of history. This was historic and we certainly plan on being back next year.
Without further ado, here is the complete list of winning films and runner-ups as decided by the FRiFF panel of 15 judges. We will be in contact with all the winners about their prizes shortly.
Best in Show: All Away – Colin Solal Cardo
Cinematic Postcard
Running into the Air – Sebastian Wöber
RUNNING INTO THE AIR – A Flight Over Switzerland from Sebastian Woeber on Vimeo.
Runner up: Teahupo’o, Du Ciel – Eric Sterman
Teahupo'o, Du Ciel from SURFING Magazine on Vimeo.
Cinematic Narrative
All Away – Colin Solal Cardo
Runner up: My forest – Sébastien Pins
Drones For Good
Mark Jacobsen – The Syria Airlift Project
Runner up: Mapeando las Invasiones de la Comarca Embera-Wounaan – James Cameron Ellis
WTF LOL
Hello World – PRENAV
Runner up: Targeted Advertising – Mitchell Rose
Student Film
Quinn Muller – Electric Africa
Runner up: Butterfly – Ryan Rizzo
Aerial Sports
Office Space FPV – Jonathon Davis aka Skitzo
Runner up: Tommy Tibajia aka Ummagawd – FPV Paradise Hawaii
I Made That!
Compilation Bart Jansen – Bart Jansen
Runner up: Chocolate Copter – Michael Niedermayr
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.
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.
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.
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
Of course, any self-respecting walking tour with a drone requires a dronie.
Time-Lapse Fog Rolls in Over Twin Peaks from ekai on Vimeo.
I shot this quick time-lapse of fog rolling over San Francisco’s Twin Peaks and Sutro Tower. Shot from a DJI Phantom 3 quadcopter above Bernal Hill. Original 6 minute clip was sped up 10x.
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:
Media Coverage
I can only imagine what 2015 has in store for our drone future.
I’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!
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.
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.
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.