Shoot 3 - Planning and Real Jobs: Scouting From the Couch, a Loose Script, the Real-Estate Job Shadow, the 'Something Better' Spec Ad, Night and 96-Day Hyperlapses, Travel Rules, and Lazy vs Pro

Demonstrated live for Lake Bled. Search YouTube for '[destination] drone', favouring short curated films (under ~5 minutes) over hour-long raw compilations; screenshot the shots worth replicating (Cmd-Option-3 while full-screen); lay them out in Photoshop (document sized to screenshot width x columns, guide layout via View > Guides), shrink, export as one JPEG for the phone. locationscout.net (free account) maps user-submitted photo spots with sun position, sunrise/sunset and comments. Google Earth 3D for terrain and sightlines - e.g. finding a hill high enough to get a panoramic of the whole lake while staying under the legal altitude; Street View for ground-level detail; and Google '[place] drone' for restrictions - Triglav National Park next to Bled being the example.

Watch high-quality videos in the genre and listen to music that fits the mood first. Hand-write a rough shot list as ideas come - no neatness - then type it up. It is 'a flexible framework/vision, not a definitive shot list', because logistics and unknown places change the shots. Structure it in sections: an opening travel sequence (the CKB airport departure), a title-card transition, road-trip and landscape connective tissue, then a detailed list for the priority location (Bled). In the field, work from the plan and slot captured shots into it or note the gaps, 'rather than shooting randomly and figuring out the story only in editing.' For the spec ad he went further - ~30 seconds of voiceover with a shot matched to each line - and learned to write clearer.

Prep: get the address, put it in AirMap (or GPS coordinates from Google Maps if AirMap can't find it) for airspace and ceiling; Weather Underground's cloud graph - sun or light cloud, not overcast; shoot in 'the first three or four hours after sunrise and the last three or four hours before sunset'; in hills, check Earth 3D or ask when the sun drops behind the ridge; ask the owner what to highlight (three building sites and an old coal mine on this 59-acre farm); charge everything, empty cards - the Drone Shoot Prep checklist. Gear: Air 2S with a PolarPro 2-5 ND; 4K30 mostly, 4K60 for its crop and compression, no 5.4K because the computer can't edit it and delivery is HD; 10-bit D-Log; ISO 100-400, shutter around 1/60 drifting to ~1/160 as light changed; 6500 K on the cloudy day. Shot list: house first as centrepiece, wider establishing shots, the five-axis parallax with a tilt down, a couple of top-downs ('monotonous' if more), low-to-ground passes, forward/back, a slow climb with rotation; a low fence-line reveal flown out and back; pull-back-and-up and push-in shot twice each; a low tilt-up to make the house 'look bigger'; handheld detail shots (wagon wheel, flowers, horses) to intercut. Framing: hide piles of materials and dead cars behind buildings, trees, angles or the 4K60 crop.

A spec ad is 'an ad for a company where they didn't hire you... up to the quality that you would be making it when you're hiring it' - a portfolio piece that might also 'catch the eye of the company.' Three-day camping trip: Seneca Rocks at 5:30 a.m. for sunrise, two nights at Dolly Sods where the wilderness side of the road is no-fly and the National Forest side is not. Power: car inverter into an Anker 100 W charger, a $135 300 Wh power station with 100 W USB-C PD, a campsite with electricity and a power strip when possible. Gear: Air 3 and Air 2S, Jackson's Mavic 3, Canon R6 Mk II with 35/50/85 f/1.8 and a 24-105, Ronin-S. Techniques: Spotlight locked on a rock so 'you have your subject moving through the scene instead of just orbiting around the subject'; a waypoint mission flown once, then flown again identically two days later at dawn and matched as a transition ('the same thing as the 96-day hyperlapse, except in real time'); two and three drones up together, 'a little bit risky' but fine with careful pilots; the car pop-up - Spotlight on the car, just under Sport max behind it, then 'floored it 100% forward and up'; the fake in-flight rig - drone legs mounted on wood and a macro rail, filmed from a moving truck; HLG for punch, with the Air 3 bug where it 'adjusts the brightness of the highlights and shadows' mid-shot; and a real lightning strike caught flying toward a storm.

Shoot near a lit town at dusk, before full dark. Shutter 'approximately half the interval between photos', capped around 1 s to limit drift blur; aperture wide; ISO 400 on a Mavic Air 2; 6900 K manual. JPEG over RAW because RAW forces a 5 s minimum interval on the Air 2S and JPEG allows 3 s. Waypoint trick: set the end point first, fly back, set the start, and run the sequence in reverse so the drone shoots start-to-end without an empty positioning flight - 'it saves battery.' Duration 8 s, interval 3 s, vertical and horizontal movement plus rotate and tilt between waypoints. In Resolve: drop the stills on the timeline as an image sequence, Transform-zoom from 4:3 to fill 16:9, put the horizon on the top third, Stabilize at defaults - smoother than DJI's onboard version with far less crop. Grade: node 1 curves + shadow/highlight recovery; nodes 2-3 the 'TimeLab Pro Istanbul' look (colour-wheel shift of yellows/reds/blues, HSL saturation on oranges and reds, HDR wheels teal in shadows and warm highlights - downloadable PowerGrade); temporal NR near max (~91) plus a little spatial; a final midtone-contrast node.

'Shoot one waypoint hyperlapse in the winter and then reshoot that exact same hyperlapse at the exact same place several months later and then combine the two.' Pick somewhere with easy repeat access ('right outside my back door'); fly only in calm wind, because wind stops the drone repeating its course precisely; match light and cloud. Air 2S settings: RAW this time; ~300 frames (~10 s at 30 fps) at ~5 s intervals; NDs dark and shutter slow - 1/15, 1/8, 1/5, even 1/2 s - for motion blur. Design a fast, complex, multi-axis move (up the valley, tilt down and rotate at the top) because speed 'hides little imperfections in the transition.' Fly home manually in Sport - faster than RTH. Save the mission from the task-library icon, name it, reload it months later; it 'memorizes the GPS location of the start.' Post: Lightroom - shadows up, highlights down, vibrance, greens away from yellow, NR ~10, sync Basic/HSL/Detail across all 295 photos, export JPEG 100 with original filenames into a subfolder. Resolve - each sequence on its own track, zoom out the black bars, Stabilizer in similarity mode on both, trim to the transition point, ~2 s cross dissolve, nudge the top clip's X/Y (and rotation) at the 50 % point to align, zoom just enough to hide the edges.

Batteries are not allowed in checked luggage - carry-on, installed or in fireproof bags; at US TSA the drone comes out of the bag, the controller usually doesn't. Abroad: confirm drones are allowed and what customs wants; search '[country] drone rules', check UAV Coach's country pages ('not always 100% accurate'), the official site, and mavicpilots.com for pilots' experience. He notes people take off from remote spots to dodge impossible registration rules - 'I am not recommending that you do it'; respect laws, signs, privacy, and expect famous spots to be no-fly, so have lesser-known alternatives. QuickTransfer: with DJI Fly open and the drone on (controller and goggles can stay off), tap the Quick Transfer box, join the drone's '<drone> Quick Transfer' Wi-Fi, wait for low-power transfer mode, browse the album and download the clip - for 'a shot off your drone really quick to post on social media'; works on many DJI models.

Timing - be there for the best light, which 'might even be in the middle of the day, depending on what you're shooting', but decide it; early also means no people and the chance to 'add myself as a subject.' Yourself in frame - POI works only for flat orbits and 'doesn't work on the six times telecamera on the Mavic 4 Pro'; Spotlight is more flexible; lock it to the ground instead of you to walk freely; GPS-convert for smoothness. Lenses - the same scene at 1x, 2.5x and 7x for options. Time passing - pre-dawn silhouettes through to direct sun to 'build out a story of time passing.' Cars - not ActiveTrack from behind: a driver on $30 walkie-talkies driving into frame under a locked-hover drone at ~30 ft, a top-down that climbs as the car enters, a tele sideways track; he lost link chasing the car out of range and let it RTH. Landscapes - not the spin ('everything is just panning past the camera way too fast'); forward with a slow turn, or the tilt-up reveal from -45. Sunsets - not 400 ft of empty sky; low, between trees, or a silhouette in front of the colour.