Drones have been that catalyst allowing me to capture imagery above everything, complementing my storytelling, so in this video i wanted to share some of my tips for capturing cinematic drone shots to help you improve your visual storytelling Music to become a better visual storyteller, specifically with your Drone youre going to have to get off the training wheels and what i mean by that is to get off using auto mode intentionally start to set your drone settings up using pro and when youre, using pro mode youre going to want to set your shutter speed. If youre shooting in 60 frames a second like we did for a lot of our daytime shots, i was using a shutter speed of one over 120 paired with nd filters a little twist off with a turn off with that one thats, pretty good nd32 check beautiful Lookout check all right lets. Do it nd filters act like sunglasses, would to our eyes blocking light coming into the lens in a natural way, without changing the color of the light they have two awesome purposes. First is so: we can use a wider aperture to capture beautifully shallow depth of field, and the second is to use a slower, shutter speed to capture long exposures and motion blur. Now the beauty of motion blur is, it makes your drone content look way more cinematic. It makes it look like there is emotion in your shots, a big difference from just using auto and everything being really sharp and high.

In contrast, having that motion blur in your shots gives more of a feeling an emotive feeling and will enable you to become a better visual storyteller. Next up is just shooting in a flat profile, now very specific to the dji. Mavic 3 is the ability to shoot in prores, now, theres, really only a few differences between the standard, mavic, 3 and the cine model, and this that is that the cine also supports prores 422 hq. This is basically a high quality compressed codec and, if youre, making films and youre an editor, this is great, but for those that arent it doesnt really make much of a difference as a prosumer or filmmaker. The main area youre going to want to check out is d log available on both versions of the mavic 3. d. Log is a color profile which preserves the shadows and the highlights and gives you an amazing amount of dynamic range to in post production. Color grade, like just look at these shots that we captured here at jindu, falls or wallament falls in final queensland. We were able to preserve so much of those lights and dark tones to fine tune our colors to what we want. I think that is absolutely paramount to improving your visuals and improving that and going that next step, like youre, getting off order, youre being intentional, with pro mode youre, also choosing to shoot in d cine or your flat color profiles. So you can really have control in post production.

Remember, were visual storytellers were going out and were using the tools to the best of our ability were not just using auto and were not just shooting from the hip. We want to have intention playing into all of these tips is what any film school will tell you, and that is time of day or lighting. You know whenever were setting up our shot. Like look now, ive got side lighting here there is a light behind this camera uh. You do this the same when you are flying your drone now time of day is paramount to how your image will look now, if youre wanting to get those really harsh long shadows if youre capturing big, bold, wide landscapes, thats, probably when the sun is setting or The sun is rising, but if youre wanting to shoot on a subject like on a beach like a single person top down, maybe thats the middle of the day. But my point here is understanding how lighting and time of day will have an impact on the shadow and therefore the depth within your shot. So i think theres a really good example that we captured here on whitehaven beach when we were at this tiny little cove. The light had completely gone, it was the sun was hid behind a shadow. When that sun came out the image drastically popped out, we were able to see those shadows carved on those rocks. We were able to see shadows on our subject, that being anna whos sitting on the beach, we were able to see the blues, the turquoise the aquas, really evolve and come to life, and this purely comes down to lighting if youre shooting in on a cloudy day.

You are not able to capture these colors and therefore going to have a less impressive visual story than one who does choose to harness, punish harness light Music. If youve been enjoying this video make sure you punch the thumbs up button, and while you do that, im going to tell you about the sun, thats right light has a drastic impact on the look of your drone footage. But so does the position of the sun in the sky and what i mean by that is that you want to be aware of where it is placed in relationship to your subject most likely if youre trying to achieve some rich contrast in your image. Youll want the sun to be either on the right or left hand side of where the drone is facing. Alternatively, youre going to get a very flat image if youre shooting with the sun straight to your subject, thats just going to create sort of a flat profile. Thats not necessarily desirable, if youre trying to make things look cinematic so be aware of where the sun is placed in the sky and rotate around your subject until you have a pleasing image Music. Another aspect which drone shots bring to your visual stories is scale. Now this is something that can be used as an opening, an establishing shot or something that you can pair with your protagonist to reflect on nuance, thought or emotion within your stories, there isnt any right or wrong way to do this other than to fly away from Your subject just to showcase something other than, i guess the point of view or lived experience or the eye level of what we see as in our day to day, i guess whats important here is to not be afraid to fly.

Your drone away is to really press the maximum altitude and height within reason of safety, making sure that youre able to showcase that scale that depth and that distance. These will all equip your stories with more flavor Music Applause, Music in regards to objects with drone shots. The reason why we fly close to objects is to showcase speed. Now, if we were to just capture a wide shot of a landscape, and we were flying forward and back, it would be really difficult to understand how fast that drone is moving. When you place a tree or a rock or an object, that the drone is able to fly past, you are able to showcase movement and how fast that camera is moving, so something to incorporate, and something to think about when you are looking to you know, create These more cinematic, visuals think about having blockers think about moving around trees. You know think about objects as well as the motion of the drone. Now you can either fly forwards and backwards. You can fly in an orbit. You can pan you can dolly zoom something that maverick 3 does better than any other drone out there is this ability to dolly zoom is to move to create movement whilst also zooming. If you dont feel confident dolly zooming, you know manually moving the camera whilst also operating the zoom. Then i highly urge you to check out master shots specifically for beginners are an incredible way to capture all the necessary cinematic movements of the camera, with one click of a button Music.

If youre interested in picking up a dji, mavic 3 cine, which i will say, is my drone of choice and i have used the phantom 4, the ares 2. ive used almost all of djis hobby drones. This mavic 3 cine is by far my favorite drone out of all of those, and if you want to pick one up for yourself, then you can click the top link in the description. Thank you guys for checking out todays video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihKmYO7eNAg