(bright music)
- I've always been into cutting edge technology
and things of that nature my entire life,
as a child I'd take apart my grandmas radio
and fix it for her.
So naturally, when I found out about this drone stuff
I was all in.
(bright music)
- When the first Phantom 1 came out
and we put the GoPro camera on it,
I put it in time lapse mode and I was flying around,
and every few seconds the camera would take a shot,
and I was so fascinated by seeing my surrounding
from 30, 50 or even 100 feet up,
and everything looked so different.
(bright music)
- Once I got in the air I realized that I could go
and visualize things like I'd never seen them before.
(bright music)
- One of the first shots that I was really stoked on,
it was a 10 foot slider move, I was just floating the drone
and I just moved 10 feet to the right, it was so simple.
Just that ease of being able to get shots with one piece
of gear, that would have in the past taken a helicopter
or a crane or a slider, it just was so cool
to be able to get that.
(bright music)
- It's a photo of my friend Randy in a kayak
with a whale not far from him, and that was the first photo
that I saw where I knew that I had to start flying drones.
(bright music)
- We're in the midst of a technological explosion
and a revolution that is all being facilitated by the fact
that we can have sophisticated cameras aloft.
(bright music)
It's just a beautiful view from up there.
- It's funny because there are actually, I mean there are
a whole bunch of little groups here and we all overlap.
This particular group of people, I mean they just gathered
around the love of aerial imagery.
(bright music)
- This all came about, it was just a fluke,
I got into photography first, I actually am a,
by day trade right now I'm a jewellery designer,
I own a jewellery company and it was a startup
that I created in my garage almost 24 years ago.
You know one day I get a call from Century Helicopter
in San Jose, they said "Hey, we got this new helicopter,
"we know you're good at shooting hummingbirds,
"can you come take a picture of this?"
And I said, naturally, "Yes."
And somebody puts a little quadcopter up in the air,
and I'm like "Oh my god, that's the coolest thing ever,
"can I try?"
And you know they said "Yeah."
And I did, and I said "Where can I get one of these?"
And I went out to Century Helicopter and bought
the first edition of DJI's Phantom series.
And I didn't know anything about these things,
this is a whole new view to me.
Paul Pan who was working at Century Helicopter at the time
says "You gotta meet Mark Johnson."
- It's hard to believe it's such a short period of time
but I was beginning to explore this technology,
both from a professional and a personal standpoint.
I was doing a lot of customization of my rigs
and as a result, people that would have questions,
they would say "Call Mark or call Barry."
And eventually one day they said "Hey, you guys
"need to hookup together."
Because we were sort of the kind of local go to sources.
At about the same time I had brought
my best friend Romeo Durscher into the mix
because he used to fly RC jets, so he and I actually
cobbled together our first FPV system, and that started
everything from the two of us just building
on that technology.
(bright music)
- We had already been testing a variety
of different products, but back then they were not
as reliable, they were not as easy to use,
it was really trial and error in essence.
We both then got into the Phantom 1, and we both loved
what we could do, and just through that we started meeting
other people, I remember one time we went
to our local dealer in San Jose an we got introduced
to Barry, and then we also met Russell Brown.
- My first experience with a drone, wasn't exactly
with a drone but it was with a photograph I saw on Facebook.
I clearly remember seeing some early photographs show up,
which appeared to be like standard helicopter shots,
but this seemed to be like 100 feet off the ground
and in tight quarters, and I started to question
just how the heck was this done because it seemed in a zone
where you could not go in a helicopter.
- So now we have Barry, Romeo and Doc I call him, Brown,
and we began comparing notes, flying together,
one thing led to another and we ended up creating a group
that we just informally called Flight Club.
- Yeah, let's do this.
(bright music)
- If it means I get to go to Africa...
- [Romeo] The group naturally became bigger and bigger,
and it was really a lot of fun because we all had no idea
about the technology and we all learned from each other.
We learned from Russell a lot about aerial photography
and videography and Mark was very much on the technical side
so he would tinker with something until he figured out
how it works, and then Barry, he has a lot of knowledge
in surroundings, like where to go and fly,
he knows all the people, he did some
really great introductions to people.
So we all brought a little bit of
a different component to the table.
(bright music)
- [Aaron] It made flying like a fun activity,
where I would go with them, I'd be inspired
to try new things or try a new piece of gear.
(bright music)
(blades rotating)
- And now here we are a couple of years later
and several of us either work for DJI or are affiliated
with them, or those of us like myself have just continued
to expand the use of the technology.
(bright music)
- This is the very first one and it hasn't flown
in quite some time.
(blades rotating)
God, it has almost no power.
Before I joined DJI, I worked on a NASA space mission
for almost 13 years and that had always been
a childhood dream of mine.
And as part of my job, I was doing education
and public outreach, going not only into classrooms,
or to science fairs, or to conferences,
but to also via social media, spread the excitement
of science technology, engineering, and math.
Now one thing that was always missing was the A for arts,
STEAM in essence, and I really believe that STEAM,
the artistic side of students and kids
needs to be catered to as well.
That's one of the beautiful things now about DJI
because I can incorporate the A for arts
into my educational plan because some of the things that
we're seeing done with our platforms is truly art.
(bright music)
- The videos that I had seen were all
pretty rudimentary as far as the cinematography side.
Like if it was a 10 minute flight, the video was 10 minutes,
it was takeoff, this is me flying around, and landing,
and there was no sort of editing or taking the best of.
(western country music)
- So it's the early Wild West days of aerial photography
and we're thinking to ourselves, what's the coolest place
we can go and see it from the sky?
- [Aaron] The first flight we did was Russell and I went out
to Arches National Monument, which was kind of (laughs)
and definitely you can't do that anymore.
- And so we walk in there, it must have been four a.m.
in the morning, Aaron flies through the arch,
two and a half years ago when it was legal (laughs).
- I edited it together and I sent Russell the video.
He immediately knew it was awesome, but we had
some questions of whether or not
we should actually post it (laughs).
- Should we post it, Do you think we should post it,
Should we not, yes, no, yes, no, (laughs).
It was early, must have been at six a.m.
- But he said to go for it and I said okay.
So we posted it, but at the end we said thanks
to the National Parks Service,
you know, as kind of like a tribute to them.
(bright music)
- Also during the Wild West days,
we headed off to Bodie, California, a ghost town.
We actually paid them for the right to fly.
But they said, "You need to fly only when
"there's no people there."
And that was actually perfect for us because they close
at six in the evening, the sun's setting,
golden light coming across the town, and we get to fly.
(bright music)
- That was the biggest comment I got about that video
is "I've never seen Bodie empty."
You know, it's always so many people.
The approach from the beginning was to try and have
a beginning, middle and end to the videos, like a story
or a subject, like Bodie was this ghost town
where Utah was of national parks.
(bright music)
If you're getting into flying, I would say to fly
with other people and other styles of flying.
Like for me, I never really do photography,
aerial photography, that's all Russell does.
So when we go out and fly, he'll do the stills
and I'll do video, we both pull away different things.
(engine revving) (bright upbeat music)
- The best advice that I ever got for any beginner fliers
is fly conservatively, take your time, learn how to fly
the drone first and then worry about your photos
because flying and photography
are two totally different things.
So once you learn how to fly and you're not thinking
about what your hands or your thumbs are doing,
it becomes very simple.
(bright music)
Before I started working for DJI,
I was a housewife for 10 years.
I'd just gotten into photography a couple of years
before that, but only as a hobby.
I took a whale watching tour and it's when
I first experienced the humpback whales in Hawaii.
From that moment, I knew that I wanted
to start taking photography more seriously.
(bright music)
I guess it goes back to a Photoshop World Conference
that I attended and Russell Brown was teaching
an aerial photography class.
He had a whole bunch of sort of expert fliers there
at the time and that were not only teaching photography,
but also how to fly drones.
(bright music)
Now I started with a Phantom 1, there was
no gimbal attached, I just had my little sports camera
on an extension arm and some Moongel,
so there was tons of vibration,
I just set it to take a picture every two seconds,
there really wasn't any composing,
I just had that really wide angle lens
and I was just throwing it up and hoping for the best.
(bright music) (blades rotating)
- So you know, a drone has inertial measurement units
that basically tell us what angle the drone is sitting at
and you know, how it's moving, the acceleration
in various axes, in three axes.
And the gimbal is basically the same thing,
so there's something that measures position and acceleration
where the camera is, and then three motors wrap
that camera platform and in real time, counteract
any movements around it.
So you'll see the camera's staying completely level
and very stable, even if the drone is doing something
like shaking when it's fighting wind, you know,
at the limits of its movement.
So gimbals, in addition to drones, that combination
basically has created this kind of revolution
that we're in now.
(bright upbeat music) (blades rotating)
That's a lot of them in the air, I think I need to get away
from more people, we have, how many are in the air?
Six or seven, yeah it's pretty cool.
My background is actually both in technology
and also in photography and publishing.
So I started off as a software engineer and after
a few years, I don't know, I felt like something was missing
in my life and I ended up taking a break,
which led me into the ocean.
(bright music)
I very quickly became an underwater photographer,
both as a profession and also as a passion.
(bright music)
Spending most of my time in the water, I was getting used
to moving really in three dimensions.
I realized that I had started to look at camera movements
not only kind of in the plane that we're on here
on the ground, but kind of moving over objects because,
you know, as divers in the ocean we do get
to move freely in three dimensions.
So I started trying to get these aerial perspectives
on land, well above land, as well and having
a really hard time trying to get
these establishing shots usually.
Really when multirotors hit, you know
these quadcopter designs.
These platforms started to become very stable
and you could attach cameras and be pretty sure
that they weren't going to fall out of the sky
or you know, I was going to be able to control it
in a safe way.
(bright upbeat music)
(blades rotating)
- My company is called Visual Law Group, we specialize
in forensic visualization, basically we work for lawyers
or companies, anybody involved in either civil
or criminal cases that needs a story told, and as a result
of that, we end up producing recreated traffic collisions,
airplane crashes, railroad disasters.
Since we're presenting that visually, you can imagine
that aerial views were necessary from the beginning.
But back in the early 90s, your options were pretty limited,
you had to either commission a fixed wing plane,
or at even greater expense, a helicopter
to go shoot custom aerials.
It was not until gee, very very late in the game
when the company DJI first came out with
the real commercially available at a reasonable price gimbal
that would stabilize the camera and that meant
we could shoot low altitude, high resolution video
and in a company like mine, that's the golden ticket.
But the final peg in the puzzle for us was the ability
to generate three dimensional models
with photogrammetric processing.
So with sophisticated software and processing,
I mentioned the Pix4D program that we use,
it uses artificial computer vision to study every image
and it identifies high contrast points and whenever
it finds the same point in more than three photographs,
it pegs it and locates it.
So it can very precisely create a map, which is a planar
or a survey type image that you can actually put a ruler to.
So we're not shooting aerial images,
we're actually capturing aerial data that is then translated
into very precise spacial points so that when
you're finished, you've got the whole area mapped
both visually and then also three dimensionally.
You can pull up the topography, the actual ground surface,
and you can see where water flows, you can actually see
the extent to which erosion has taken place
and you can use the same technology to map disease patterns,
if the software's calibrated to calculate and measure
the areas that are blighted.
So it's a really revolutionary tool
that's becoming accepted in a lot of fields.
(bright upbeat music)
- So I truly believe we have only scratched the surface
of the iceberg, this technology has quickly evolved
from just your very basic quadcopter to already
a very sophisticated machine and we want to educate
the new customer or the potential customer
not only about our product, but what are the laws
and regulations and what are the expectations.
When we use the word drone, the majority of people already
have a bad feeling about the term drone, mostly stemming
because of military applications with the technology.
Now it's up to us to showcase the positive influences
this technology has had and will have in the future.
Lastly, my big goal is to get the technology
into the classrooms so students can not only put together
the hardware, but also do software coding and through that
can learn and get motivated and inspired
to take this technology to new heights.
(bright upbeat music)
- Go.
It's a new product that Zeiss has been working on
called Cloud Live, there, so now we got a live view
and you see it's like a stereoscopic old school
view projectors and inside of here, I got that,
so when I put it all together, I've got almost a 3D image,
except I have the ability to when I turn this it turns
the copter's gimbal.
- Oh right.
- Got the panning.
- That is amazing.
- I'm loosing signal, are you?
- I got it, but it's choppy.
- [Bryan] Did you see how nice that is?
- [Aaron] Yeah.
- [Bryan] Very little practice needed, you know.
(bright upbeat music)
- Dude, it's just crazy.
- Yeah, it works that good.
- Holy. Ha!
This is actually amazing.
- Yeah, it's really great technology.
- This is like having an Oculus on your head.
(bright upbeat music)
- It's strange, any photograph you took from the sky
two and a half years ago with one of these copters
and a GoPro, like wow, that's the most amazing photograph
and it's just somebody's garbage can
and you're looking straight down on it, you know,
it was the truth, it was really, really interesting
and even Romeo Durscher and I have been chatting about this,
we got to go to the next level, it cannot be
just the garbage can next door, we're really trying
to take really great photographs from the sky
instead of just a photograph from the sky.
(upbeat electronic music)
- There you go.
Okay, batteries, copter, hold that, controller, iPhone,
and I am ready to go.
(upbeat electronic music)
I'm going to light this rock with this light
that's suspending below this quadcopter
while my camera is taking a long exposure.
I am going to take off, Aaron, are you ready for this?
Gentlemen, here we go, I'm going out to sea.
Aaron, I'm going to hover here so we can start our exposure.
- [Aaron] Here we go, oh wow.
What is, I think we need to bathe some more of this--
- [Russell] I think so too,
I'm going to bathe more light over here.
What's that?
- [Aaron] Wait just a second.
- Just a second.
I'm going to stay at that same height,
but just move around.
(upbeat electronic music)
- [Aaron] Well it looks bad ass.
- It looks bad ass?
- [Aaron] Yeah, check it out.
- [Russell] Yes, that's bad ass.
(upbeat electronic music)
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