2019 has been a special year for me where I have developed myself and cultivated my passion for travel and videography. One of my very best companions on this journey has without a doubt been my amazing DJI Mavic Air. During this past year, I’ve explored countries such as Denmark, Lithuania, Thailand and Cambodia. Based on these trips I’ve created the above video which gives a glimpse of what I've experienced throughout the year.
This success is partly due to you guys as well. You’ve been a huge support to me since I became a member here and you’ve encouraged me to keep creating and inspiring others to get the full potential of their DJI device to become a better videographer or photographer! As a token of my appreciation I want to give something back to you guys. Therefore, I will share some of my absolute best tips for aerial or handheld photography/videography.
Be Creative
You’ve probably heard it many times before but thinking outside the box can have a huge impact on the overall impression of your result. Personally, I think experimenting and looking objectively at your clips can help you to transform even the worst ones to look captivating. You’d be surprised of how much you can save or improve by trying different things in your editor like stabilizing, reversing, speeding up, color grading or something else. Only the imagination sets limits.
To give an example I’ve received tons of attention and comments on a specific clip from the above video. As you can see it looks very much like it’s raining outside but in reality, it’s something I’ve added in post. Details like these are important and can help push your video or photo to the next level. Create something people will notice and utilize your artistic freedom!
Sound Design
Sounds are as important as visuals. Besides the mentioned rain clip above you’ll also notice that I added the sound of rain to the clip or in the start with the water where you can hear the waves. These sound elements are often left unused and unexploited but when addressed and utilized correctly they can increase the impact of the visuals dramatically. In my video or for that matter in all my videos I always use many kinds of soundtracks to enhance the film experience.
Go Slow
As most of you know slow movements with your gimbal or camera is associated with cinematic and generates the impact of shooting from something like a helicopter. This will increase your work’s production value. Moving your drone slowly also allows you to have more control within the movie you’re trying to make. For instance, if you want to reveal something slowly as I did near the beginning of my video with the floating village it would be ideal.
Post Processing
After you’ve been processing your videos or photos for a little while, some lessons about how photography works and the limitations and strengths it has will become more apparent to you. This is where you can turn your photo or video to something new that has never been seen before, it’s completely within your control. Factors I particularly like to adjust are light, colors and curves. For photos, I always use Lightroom and sometimes Photoshop if I want to remove a branch or anything else which can improve the photo. For videos I use Premiere Pro and I’d say that all these programs are really simple if you just decide to invest some time in it and learn the basic things.
Thank you very much for the attention, I hope you enjoyed my video and that my tips were helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!