When we started this site a couple months ago, I had a great idea for an original video series. I would drone the Friday night home football games this season at Reading Memorial High School. A different kind of view than everyone was used to seeing. That was the easy part. What transpired in getting that accomplished was a far greater task than I anticipated.
I started off by looking on YouTube for anyone else making High School football drone videos. Surprisingly, there were very few. The handful of videos that I found, that lasted longer than 20min, had the drone all over the place and were distracting. The most glaring issue was none, yes none of them had audio. Which makes sense when your drone can’t record audio. Content wise, you can always dub over some music or background noise but why didn’t anyone think to just record the audio separately? That’s a big part of going to the game itself. After coming up empty on my research, I began planning what would get the job done.
A couple items right off the bat I knew would be a major problem:
- Battery Life – from prior recordings, I guesstimated about 30min of flight time before I had to land. So I made sure I had 4 batteries, 1 for each quarter.
- Crowds – you’re not allowed to fly your drone over crowds at all. I had to find a location that was not distracting to anyone, especially the players and that also wasn’t over the stadium.
- Location – I settled on Birch Meadow Drive, right at the 50-yard line outside the fence, it was perfect. It allowed me to park my truck there. I could fly straight up off the back bed without being close to anyone and with giant LED spotlights shining down on the field, nobody would ever see it in the air.
- Audio – how was I going to accomplish what others couldn’t? All my videos either have lapel wireless microphones or a RØDE shotgun microphone but in close proximity. I had the brilliant idea of going into the brush that separates the sidewalk from the stadium fence and have my RØDE mic on a tripod to be closer and have the input volume cranked up. The problem with that? The actual brush at night-time was like an episode of Survivor. I settled on the roof of my truck instead.
With all of the planning done, we headed to the game early on September 23rd to get the parking spot and to set up. But the video below is from September 30th’s game… So, what happened on the 23rd after practicing and planning everything? Mother Nature. The winds were gusting so fast that Friday night, they even snapped in half, one of two trees in my front lawn which then landed across the road blocking the street. All was not lost though. We were able to fly up temporarily that night, see how the drone would handle but more importantly, verify that the audio from the game would indeed work correctly.
The 30th came and it was literally game time again. This time, the weather was perfect. We had a few hiccups here and there though. For example, just because the quarter is 12min long and the drone can last 30min, doesn’t account for time outs or stoppage in play. For the most part we got everything.
Then came editing. We ended up with close to 200GB of 4k footage, split between 50 files since the max recording is 4GB per clip. Stitching them all together was easy, syncing the audio was the biggest headache to get right. Because we had to fly down to swap batteries, the separate audio from the game was still recording, thus it created gaps that needed to be aligned across all the files. All in all, from importing, editing, exporting and uploading, it took a solid day’s worth of time to get right. It didn’t help that after it was all done, I pivoted into wanting the live score shown throughout the game like we were working with ESPN’s budget. The result was worth it though.
For the future, we plan on recording the band/half time show now that we have the timing down. We know when we should start to fly up to conserve battery at the start of the game, when the 3rd quarter actually starts compared to when the team gets on the field etc.
In closing, I’d like to thank everyone who walked past us those two weeks on Birch Meadow Drive and commented on how cool the video feed on the controller was and how much they loved the prior drone stadium video. Reading has the most incredible community and I’m glad to be a part of it.
Without further ado, I hope you enjoy “Friday Night Super Lights” as much as we did producing it.
