Welcome to the section on flight patterns.
This is going to be a lot of fun.
I don’t have illustrative videos playing in the background to express each of the points that I’m making.
What our flight patterns.
Well once you’ve learned all your basic flying skills you’re going to be going out there planning your flights flying your flights to hopefully lead to some outstanding footage that you can then edit together for your final production.
The key section of that are the flight patterns that you’re going to be flying.
There are seven of them but I’ll get into in some more detail.
Each one of these flight patterns will help you generate the video dramatics that you’re trying to get in your footage.
So the wow factor footage that will then be useful to put in your final production.
The seven different flight patterns and these are roughly in order of difficulty are as follows.
We’ve got the line the line is where you pick a geographical line and you fly down it.
Would then go up the crab.
The crab is similar to the line we were flying in a line.
But this time you’re flying sideways.
And typically for a shorter distance we then got the elevator the elevator is where you’re flying straight up.
I would have called it the lift.
But a lot of my audience is American.
You’re flying straight up collecting different types of footage on the way which I’ll get into in more detail later.
You then got the 360 the 360 is where you hover in place and then you spin around slowly getting a great panoramic view.
You then got the ark and from this point on it’s getting a little bit more difficult to complete these flight pattern successfully.
The arc is where you keep a target in the frame of your camera and then you fly around that target with the target remaining in the frame.
You then got the moving object.
This is the flight pattern where you get any object that’s moving within your camera view.
So for instance it could be birds flying across your flight path.
It could be something where you were actually tracking the movement of an object.
So maybe some friends surfing.
Finally you’ve got the close call it is proximity flying.
We are trying to fly as close to the surface as possible.
Loads of fun but loads of crashes as well.
Each flight pattern has its own specific purpose and when combined with your gimbels skills you then got the flying skills to go off and generate the flight dramatics that were after in all the footage that we’re trying to collect.
I’ve done extensive analysis of my own videos and other people’s videos.
And what becomes very clear from that analysis is it you get the best footage by best footage mean footage with the strongest video dramatics within it you get the best footage when you tend to focus on one of these seven flights patterns for part of your flying.
Each flight pattern would lead to its own video dramatic.
And there would typically be multiple video dramatics that will be the consequence of these flight patterns.
What I want you to do is to understand what each of these flight patterns are so you can go off and practice them and then you’re going to use these flight patterns when you’re planning your flights.
So that means planning before you get to the fly site and then typically where most of your planning is done at your impromptu planning when you’re up in the air.
And so rather than saying let’s just head off to that hill over there have a look around and then fly back again.
You’re going to say right I’m going to use the line flight pattern to fly down that river towards that cliff face when I get to the cliff face.
I’m going to use an elevator flight pattern to fly up it collecting footage along the way and they’re going to use a crab flight pattern.
Once I get to the ridge at the top once I’ve completed my crab crab flight pattern and then I’m going to do a 360 to get a great panoramic view once I’ve done that and then he used the up line flight pattern once more to fly down the ridge over to the water over there and my friends of surfing were old perform a moving object flight pattern to collect some final footage.
If you think about eagle flying in that way you are going to have a lot more usable footage with strong video dramatics at the end of your flying.
And if you’ve just said when I just fly over that hill over there and then fly back again.
So.
How am I going to teach you about these flight patterns.
Well you can have a lecture on each of the flight patterns a short one and I’m going to discuss it in more detail.
Playing in the background of the lecture you’re going to have illustrative video showing each of the points that I’m making.
I’m going to discuss key tips on how to perform each flight pattern.
We also will be discussing the gotcha’s the things that you need to watch out for because they tend to be different depending on what flight pattern that you’re going for.
And then importantly I’m going to be discussing why are we doing each flight pattern.
What are the video dramatics that we’re trying to generate from that flight pattern.
Once you’ve completed the lecture part of the discussion on that flight pattern you’re then going to have a separate video which is going to be a standalone video where I’m basically not talking and this is going to give you further examples of the flight pattern.
It’s also going to give you some good examples of editing techniques that you can use to put together a didge that you collect whilst you look at that.
There will be an exercise in every single case a set of things that I want you to think about as you’re actually watching that video.
Right now let’s start with our very first exercise before we dive into the flight pattern discussions.
I want you to find a favourite flight video of yours and if you got none come to mind then I’ve put some suggestions in the notes section of this particular lecture.
For each clip that you see within that flight video I want you to identify which flight pattern you think is being used.
Also consider carefully how do you think it’s making the viewers feel.
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