A Bird’s Eye View: Playing with Drone Video Footage

Anyone who’s worked with us on a web or marketing project knows we love original photography. It’s really hard to find a stock image that wraps up your company’s culture and image as perfectly as, well, photos that are actually of your company’s culture. It’s a less than groundbreaking insight, we know.

We’re also big fans of video and using drones to capture images from unusual angles. Since we’re right next to City Park, taking an afternoon off to run around on a soccer field as our drone filmed us seemed like a great way to augment our website’s background videos with video that featured a new pregnancy bump (Val), new staff members (Stacia, Josh, Spencer and Matt) and a new hair color (Kerrie). As much as this sounds like just another excuse to run around and practice our cartwheels in the name of excellent B-roll footage, it gave us a chance to try a few new things and hone our skills before pitching new ideas to clients:

• Brand-Building Footage: What’s the use of shooting footage if it doesn’t encapsulate what your brand represents? We didn’t just head out to the park to run around: We brainstormed ideas for shots that’d perfectly represent our work hard/play hard, team-centered culture in a way that’d make use of motion, and bird’s eye angles.
• Testing New Technology: Miles and Spencer aren’t strangers to drone photography, but because we were switching from still shots to capturing motion, we needed an effective way to capture action without relying on an Air Force-trained drone pilot to keep us in frame. Fortunately, Spencer mastered our drone’s movement-tracking capabilities, and once properly configured, everything went off without a hitch.
• Multimedia Integration: On-brand drone video is cool, but if it’s not tucked into your website properly, you’re not doing yourself any favors. From the onset, we planned shots that would not only look great, but would slip into our website while looking amazing and adding value.
• Team Building: There’s nothing better for all-around morale than putting your heads together and talking about what you love about your company’s culture. That and running about in a park on a sunny Friday after lunch is always pretty sweet, too.

Would we do this again? Of course we would! Would we do it more efficiently and effectively the second time around? Of course we would! That’s why we tackle these projects in-house: We’re the kind of web and marketing geeks who truly enjoy working through new ideas.