Vancouver from above
Happy Summer Solstice!
It's hard to believe it's already June! It's lush and green everywhere we look, but just a little more than 3 months ago, we managed to pull off this dream winter aeiral shoot for Destination Vancouver.
Destination Vancouver is doing big things! We have been very fortunate to be their creative partner to help them create visual assets to promote our beautiful city. One of our goals last winter was to photograph and film Vancouver's ever changing skyline in the winter. It's really amazing that we live in a place where we can be in a lush rainforest in one minute, and not even half an hour later we are up skiing in the local mountains.
So for the whole winter, we were on the lookout for that perfect combination of a blue bird day with the right amount of snow in the mountains, and the right amount of greenery in the city. It wasn't easy to say the least. We had to be ready to shoot at a moment's notice when we have the weather. But at the same time, we were also busy working on our other projects domestically and internationally.
Kindred is a small shop by design. Our flexibility is one of our biggest strengths. We are equally comfortable on set with 100 busy crew members or just one guy flying solo. In this case, it's the later! Except this one guy Hubert (me!) is the photographer and director, and I was flying with legendary pilot Kelsey Wheeler from Talon Helicopters, and Legendary aerial DP John Trapman from Vancal Cine. We also had our fearless client Tianna with us. A lot of credit must go to Destination Vancouver here. They have a vision of what they need, and they took our advice to go with the more complicated but effective solution here.
We went with the helicopter solution over drones for a few reasons. We love drones, but for this particular brief, we felt it had to be a chopper with a Shotover system. The perfect crispy Vancouver winter sunset is hard to come by. A lot of time, when it's sunny in the city, the mountains peaks are clouded over. Oh and last year also happened to be one of the worst years snow fall wise... So, we felt when we finally get that weather break, we need to get all our shots in one sunset. That means we need to go from spot to spot quickly. For this shoot, we needed to cover the mountain and city. I estimate that we probably covered a good 30-40 km each way. A drone can never cover that distance in the short winter sunsets we have.
Vancouver Harbour, which is one of the focal points of our shoot, is also one of the busiest commercial water aerodromes in the world. That means we would never get the proper permissions to shoot certain angles with a drone. However, in a helicopter, we are treated just like any other commercial aircrafts. We could pretty much go wherever we wanted, working with the harbour's air traffic control.
We also needed to shoot high and long for our shots. Drones wouldn't be able to get up to the altitude we needed legally. We needed to shoot long to compress the distance between the mountains and the city for the perspective that Vancouver is cradled by these amazing snow covered mountains. The long focal length isn't common in drones, but the beauty of a Shotover system is that we can use whatever lens and focal length we wanted.
In our little chopper, we were perfectly rigged up. Kelsey sat upfront to fly (of course!). John sat next to him with the all the controls to operate the cine camera in the Shotover mounted outside just under the nose of the aircraft. I sat directly behind Kelsey so that we are on the same side. It's easier to communicate and position ourselves in the sky that way. I had the pocket door taken off to have the freedom to move and frame up the stills. I was able to basically sit halfway outside of the helicopter. It was juuuust a little chilly. I also had a director's monitor rigged up in front of me. That way, I was able to direct John while at the same time shoot the stills. Tianna sat next to me with a client monitor so she could also see what's happening real time and give me feedback. Everyone had a job and we were busy!
Then we were set up to witness mother nature's magic. She did not disappoint!
Long story short, we pulled off the shoot in the end! Having watched the weather all winter, I think I can confidently say we nailed the timing. That, combined with our production and creative planning, and a little magic from mother nature, gave us these images. Big shoutout of Kelsey and John for being such incredible collaborators, and Destination Vancouver for always trusting us. Here are some stills. More video clips to come!
