Drone footage

In practice this means a pilot with a drone, a second person watching the airspace and a list of three to five shots agreed in advance. Nobody flies blind. On a single shoot day you get twenty to forty minutes of flight split into two windows, early morning and late afternoon, when the light is low and buildings cast shadows. Batteries last about twenty minutes, so the precision of the brief matters more than the hardware.

Why it matters: a manufacturer near Nitra had a plant you could not see from the road. One pass over the site explained the scale of the operation faster than two minutes of the managing director talking. Drone work is not an expensive line, on a one day shoot it is a fraction of the day rate, but you also pay for waiting on weather. Wind over ten metres per second or rain cancels the flight and moves the date.

How it runs: the pilot has to be registered and certified under European rules, there are restrictions over people and built up areas, and flying near an airport needs clearance. You supply the landowner's consent and a contact for the site manager, we handle the rest. We file for permissions at least a week ahead, because neither authorities nor building managers answer within the hour.

When it is not worth it: if the site is an ordinary steel shed in an industrial park, the aerial shot shows a car park and nothing else. A drone also cannot rescue a video with nothing to say, it only gives it a flashier opening. And you cannot shoot an interview from the air, so when a person is the core of the film, aerials are decoration rather than a solution.

We work to a rule of three: before anyone takes off we write down the three shots we must come home with, and only then do we fly. Everything else is a bonus. Try it today: watch your last corporate video and count how many seconds of aerial footage actually explained something.