ÓLAFUR ARNALDS ‘ZERO’


PRODUCTION


AERIAL FILMING


Aerial projects are not always about filming from aerial platforms; sometimes they’re about getting more than just cameras up in the air. One such was the music video


for the track Zero from Icelandic multi-instrumentalist and producer Ólafur Arnalds’ 2020 Some Kind of Peace album. Filmed earlier this year it is a hauntingly atmospheric piece of work, featuring two dancers performing at night in a spectacularly-lit woodland. Full of shifting lights and patterns, much of the lighting for the piece was mounted on a drone provided by The Helicopter Girls. The company originally brought


their drone-mounted LED lighting modules for a science fiction film that wanted a practical way of producing a UFO, and their use has grown from there. “There are various options


when flying drone lighting, from a 4xLED array which is mounted on the MoVI Pro gimbal allowing pan, roll and tilt control of the head, to larger fixed panels of LED modules,” comments Katya Nelhams-Wright, Technical Director. “Those are most commonly flown in panels of 10


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or 15 lamps due to the weight limitations of standard heavy lift drones but we found DoPs just wanted more light, particularly for work in forests, as on Zero, so we built a bespoke frame to carry up to 20 LED modules which our larger aircraft can carry with exceptional flight times. You can change the tilt angle and use gels and I have given it a waterproof coating as I’m petrified it’s going to short out in the damp conditions at night but they’ve been bombproof so far.” The lighting array is mounted


on The Helicopter Girls’ Watts Innovations hex drone, which has a total takeoff weight of 36kg. As in Zero the lights are often used to light the underneath of a tree canopy, and that requires a fairly hefty degree of skill for the pilot. “When flying a camera they use


a pilot feed from their FPV camera as well as the camera feed itself to move the drone where it needs to go to get the shot, but here there’s no picture feed so they’re flying blind,” explains Nelhams-Wright. “They may be flying in an elevated position from a genie boom above the tree canopy, taking off and landing 30 feet below themselves in the dark, so we use a picture feed from the ground cameras which I, or whoever is operating the gimbal, can use as a tool to direct the light and drone’s movement. “It’s a very different way


of working and can be hugely challenging, we take a spotter on the crew to guide the pilot so there has to be a lot of trust in the team. But it’s a stunning tool and we have used it to great effect on projects like Brave New World and Hannah 2 as well as Zero.”


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