G’day from Alex Kavanagh, Founder and Creative Director of DRONEGEAR.
Where has the past year gone?! It’s been quite the last few months for our team, and I wanted to highlight some of our commercial work that has been recently released.
Last year, we had a four-day Ford shoot in the Mojave desert flying for Wally Pfister’s production company RESET CONTENT. Our aerial cinematography is featured in multiple commercials that aired late last year and are still being televised throughout 2019!
The commercial below featuring a pack of Ford Trucks, both new and classic, has been on-air for a while now and was advertised during the 2018 Major League Baseball World Series.
A second Ford commercial spot was produced from that same four-day shoot which aired during the 2018-19 National Football League Super Bowl. This commercial features four of our drone shots with the lineup consisting of the very first shot, the second shot at 11 seconds, the third shot at 22 seconds and the last being the final aerial shot.
It was an honor and a privilege to work side-by-side with Academy Award Winner Wally Pfister, who was operating the drone camera whilst I was piloting. He's a hands-on Director who really embraced the drone technology for this commercial series. In the pre-production meetings, it was great to see the storyboards prior to going out on location. Wally knew exactly what he wanted in every single drone shot, making the workflow effortless.
A funny thing came to our attention on this shoot: Another drone production company was booked for the San Francisco location the week prior to our shoot in the Mojave, so multiple people on set approached me and asked, “are you our drone guy?” in a somewhat apprehensive tone. I myself, wearing our official DRONEGEAR ball cap, responded with "yes!" They then proceeded to tell me that “the last drone team in San Francisco crashed not once, but twice, with the first time in an open field (however you manage to do that) and the second time in downtown San Francisco, into a building and nearly hitting people!” Needless to say, they were subsequently removed from production and asked to leave. It's always a pleasure for us to come to the rescue, which seems to happen more often these days.
We executed our four-day shoot in high winds safely and got the shots as per the pre-production meetings and storyboards, which you can see in the multiple commercials still airing and in the links above.
A big thank you to Matt Feige, our Executive Producer, who helped secure all of our necessary film permits, UAV insurance and paperwork weeks prior to the shoot. Having a great team always makes my job so much easier on the week of the shoot and gives the client peace of mind from the very beginning.
In April of this year, we had a two-day shoot in Utah and Nevada for Honda while filming their new Talon 1000X-4 & Talon 1000R ATVs. With our main drone production team being located in Los Angeles, it was easy to get out to these locations as Nevada is a four-hour drive and the Utah location only an hour out from Las Vegas. This was another big production with many moving parts, and it was a pleasure to see our drone cinematography as the final shot in the commercial below.
Here’s the extended commercial with three of our drone shots at 1:05, 2:17 and 2:24, all done in very high wind conditions which was no problem for our team to accomplish safely.
If you’re in need of our drone aerial cinematography services and would like to start pre-production planning with a creative shotlist, organizing permits or paperwork, please reach out to our EP Matt Feige or myself. We’re happy to help make the process as easy and seamless as possible.
DRONEGEAR PRODUCTIONS has the largest network of certified drone pilots and specialty camera operators in the world. We pride ourselves on our ability to coordinate, in having a AAA safety rating with zero incidents on-set, as well as UAV insurance coverage up to $5 million.