Attack of the Drones
What happens when you mix bored employees, some remote-controlled drones, and an active imagination? This.
Behind the Scenes
Back in 2015, my brother Jeffrey worked at RadioShack, and they were holding a contest amongst employees to make the best video showing off the drones they sell. Given that we had a week to put this together and it had to fit within the 15-second Instagram limit at the time, I decided to storyboard the whole thing. We were originally going to just use one drone, but the trailer for The Force Awakens released around that time, and the famous TIE fighter shot inspired us to use more, and even mix in some TIE Fighter sounds.
Storyboard — frame 1
Me sitting down in the office at RadioShack and sketching out how many individual plates we'll need for each shot. The most complex shot in terms of piecing together plates was the shot of the drones lifting off.
Shooting & Rigging
The drone we were using was extremely difficult to get to do what we wanted, which was rather specific motions. We tried to anchor it to the ground with wire so it would only go so high, but this failed miserably. So we just opted to puppet the thing by hand with the propellers going and use roto to isolate the drone. We generally let the propellers do their thing and simply guided the drone through the air. It was quite fun.
Hand-puppeting the drone for the lift-off
For the rack-focus moment, I shot the foreground drone separately against green foam board. This also worked for the flyby shot, where I pupettered the drones banking, and then extracted and animted them in post.
Foreground drone element
In order to shoot the POV shot, we rigged the drone up to the shoulder mount that I had for the camera. Removing the back propellers prevented them from hitting my lens, and we were able to run the front propellers for real. This gave us real reflections and lighting changes as the drone moved through the store. And it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had with a camera rig.
Testing the rig
Breakdowns
Extracting one of the drones with roto; this drone needed a little extra animation to drift a little so it didn't overlap another.
Plate → Final
Drag to compare each raw plate against the finished composite. 2026 Nate has so many comp notes for 2015 Nate.
