The goal of my video was to show the gardens and pond that my wife built over the years. She is the "Set Designer" I referred to in the video. As I started flying and shooting clips, the project then evolved into making a spoof on the House of Cards theme. When I first published this video some time ago, I was expecting someone to say "Hey wait a minute... you can't do that with a drone!" But nobody caught on, and I was surprised.
If you recall the opening to House of Cards, they include a scene where the sun shadows on a building is the primary movement and the camera location is the secondary movement. I wanted to create that.
The problem with such a scene has to do with the time scale of movement. I wanted to create hyperlapse scenes with at a minimum of two time scales, and perhaps three. The time scale of vegetation movement is in seconds, the scale of cloud movement is minutes, and the time scale of sun shadow movement is hours. Hours??! I don’t know of any off-the-shelf drone that can fly for hours. “Hey wait a minute…!”
So I cheated. It’s cheating because I did not fly. To capture the sun shadows moving across the lawn, I had to do a time lapse of 15 seconds per shot over a period of 1.5 hours, giving me roughly a 12 second clip at 30 fps. The only way to do that is to place the MPP on a platform…. “Cheating”.
All of the time lapse shots, especially with sun shadow movement had to be done on a platform. And a high one so it “looks” like I’m flying.
The pond shot includes time scales of seconds (vegetation, water and fish moving) combined with real time camera movement. That shot was made over a 20 minute period, but I could not hover and get an extremely slow yaw to pan over the pond. So I cheated… I made a platform that would rotate 45 degrees over a 15 minute period.
Time lapse intermixed with realtime flying clips and I've got a spoof movie!
I had fun making this video, and I learned a lot about time-lapse... all the while my wife was rolling her eyes and laughing at me.
Here’s my stationary platform…
View attachment 91327
And here’s my rotating platform…
View attachment 91328
