Attack of the Drones

2015

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.

At the time, I did a big post on Imgur, so below is pretty much that post copied over.

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.

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.

I knew I wanted to do a rack focus to the last drone in the foreground, so we'd have to shoot it completely separate. So once the other drone passes were shot we changed our focus and shot this guy against some green foam board, which we picked up at Target, which was just around the corner from RadioShack in the mall.

For the dolly shot, the green board came in handy again. What I did was puppet the drone to do stationary movements, like banking back and forth and tilting forward. I then used different sections of this for each drone. Once the drone was extracted (with roto to deal with my hand and keying for the rest), I could animate each drone to zip by in my dolly shot.

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.

This particular drone pass required fully articulate roto for two reasons.

  1. It ended up passing in front of Ronny.

  2. It also ended up settling right in front of another drone, so I animated it to drift to the side a bit, which helped give some more life to the shot beyond just a handful of drones lifting straight up.

The POV shot was the most involved and took me 2 1/2 nights to complete (I was working a full-time web development job at the time). This is a view of the 3D tracked camera and the various spark elements in place.

I went a little overboard with some stuff that no one will notice, particularly when it was uploaded to Instagram. But now you can notice! Like the laser blast that gets deflected into a display case at the beginning of the POV shot. The shattering glass element is from Action Essentials 2.

With the laser impacts occurring all over the store, there was a lot of annoying roto that didn't seem to end.