Sometimes when I just need to decompress, I’ll find solace through dance.
While there have been periods where I might have gone months, or even years, without having practiced, it has always been a part of my life. Breaking was one of the first forms of self-expression I discovered where I truly felt free to be myself. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about it at least once.
In recent days, with Corona still not having settled down, and spending extended time at home working, I found myself gravitating back to my roots.
My recent video shows a peek at some of my practice footage and it takes a significant departure from my usual way of shooting. And that’s because all of it was shot from a drone! Yes, that’s right. Shot with a drone. In my house 🙂
Let’s do a quick rewind to last weekend for some filler context — I celebrated my birthday and for that my wife got me a DJI Mavic Mini! LOVE
I had been hinting at wanting to get one for a while, so this was the perfect gift for me and I have been absolutely loving it so far!
And so this video is my first test putting an edit together with it.
The idea here was to get an overhead shot pointing down of me practicing. No fancy transitions. Not even a color grade. What you see are almost completly stock settings. The only settings I manually modified were the exposure and the frame rate which I set to 24FPS (both relatively recent additions to the Mavic Mini firmware apparently).
The little drone shoots at a maximum resolution of 2.7K and to test that quality, you’ll notice how I punch into the frame a few times to get some closeup shots. There is some noticeable grain if you look close, but I think part of that has to do with the lowlight situation I deliberately set up for the scene.
One little editing trick that I also added in was the use of keyframing the scale of the video. You may notice some subtle movement “zooming” in and out. This is due to the keyframed scaling that I did. Without it, you’ll realize that the drone is actually hovering in a static position not moving at all! When working with 4K video, there’s a lot more information to work with so quality “loss” is barely noticeable. But in this case, I was able to make it work with 2.7K as well.
I haven’t had much of a chance to take this out yet and see its capabilities in full, but I am so far very impressed. Luckily our house is quite spacious, so I’ve been firing up the drone between work breaks (no pun intended!) to practice a bit.
Expect more video content soon. And hopefully with some epic drone shots!
This content is part of an ongoing self-challenge to create b-roll for 30 days. I must emphasize the absence of the phrase “consecutive days”. If this were the case, then I would have already failed this challenge. But I am committed to seeing this through! If you’re interested, follow my tag #30DaysOfBRoll on my blog here.
I also have a YouTube channel, which is where I will be uploading my videos respectively. If you wanted to have a sneak peak at what I might be publishing next on the blog…
The Sapporo Nomad 
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