Lucidity
UFO Pilot
As you can see, our whirlwind adventure at the New York City Drone Film Festival (http://www.nycdronefilmfestival.com/) is at its end, and we're back at home in Portland, Oregon. Courtesy two external, 32,000 mAH batteries, I was able to keep my laptop alive for the entire duration of our flights both to and from the East Coast to have this video ready for you to enjoy upon our return.
Although our schedule didn't leave much time for sightseeing, we had a great trip to New York and the film festival became a sort of living “Who's Who” of the unmanned aerial photography community. RotorDrone has pulled together a collection of links to all of the winning videos, as well as some still photographs from the event, which you can see by following this link: (http://www.rotordronemag.com/nyc-drone-film-festival-winners-announced/).
As you saw in the video, we got to speak with and seek advice from lots of people who attended, as well as catch up with old friends and meet some people in person with whom we only had the opportunity to interact with online up until now – like Steve Cohen of NYCDUG (http://www.meetup.com/nycdug/) and the team from RotorDrone magazine (http://www.rotordronemag.com/).
Left on the cutting room floor on this outing was our very good friend Rich Hanson of the Academy of Model Aeronautics (http://www.modelaircraft.org/). We got an interview with him during our trip to the Seaview Rotary Wings RC Helicopter Club (http://flysrw.com/) in Brooklyn and the wind got so bad that the audio was unintelligible. Sorry, Rich! Fortunately, we'll have an opportunity to catch up with him again in two weeks, at FlySafe (http://flysafetraining.org/) in Atlanta.
As always, hearty thanks to Rick and Beth from GoProfessional Cases (http://goprofessionalcases.com/) – our official travel sponsor. Without their support, we never would have made it to New York. Also, special thanks goes out to the folks at Hobbico (http://www.hobbico.com/home.html) and Futaba (http://www.futaba-rc.com/index.html), who provided us with VIP tickets to the festival.
Having those tickets gave us the privilege of “walking the red carpet” – being announced and standing in front of a backdrop festooned with sponsor logos while people photographed and videotaped us. My plan for capturing that moment succumbed to an interlocking series of failures, which is why I had to dream up that intellectual property rights canard you saw in the finished video. Anyway, it was fun – and if you possess imagination sufficient to picture us standing in front of a backdrop festooned with sponsor logos, then you didn't miss anything.
There is one more thing to call your attention to in this video: the last two minutes and 40 seconds. It's a time lapse “oner” that includes views of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans as we depart New York City and land in San Francisco.
All the credit for this goes to Techinstein, who set up a Mobius with a suction cup mount prior to takeoff and kept it rolling the whole time we were in the air using an external battery. We were blessed with clear skies across most of the country, so you can see a remarkable amount of detail on the ground.