FPV Drones in Cinema. Komodo or ALEXA? Get Ready for Dynamic Aerial FPV Footage

FPV drones in cinema

There is no doubt that aer­i­al FPV pho­tog­ra­phy is con­sid­ered a key film­mak­ing method­ol­o­gy today. Now that movie cam­eras are small­er, lighter and more com­pact, they are much eas­i­er to use with an FPV drone. Action film direc­tors have stud­ied this tool and are active­ly using it in cin­e­matog­ra­phy. And it works! Michael Bay’s “Ambu­lance” motion pic­ture was actu­al­ly filmed with FPV drones capa­ble of car­ry­ing RED Komo­do action cam­eras.

Trailer for the movie “ER”

For ref­er­ence: Pro­fes­sion­al FPV Pilot (2019 Drone Rac­ing World Cham­pi­on) Alex Vanover (also known as Cap­tain Vanover) was invit­ed as the FPV Spe­cial­ist for this film.

Behind-the-scenes video of the filming process of the film “Ambulance”

Fast X

The oth­er day it became known that the direc­tors of the tenth part of the Amer­i­can media fran­chise “Fast and the Furi­ous” (called “Fast X”), the shoot­ing of which should be com­plet­ed only next year, also involved cin­e­mat­ic FPV drones in the process, in order to achieve bet­ter visu­al­iza­tion of dynam­ic scenes.

Trailer for Fast X movie

Behind-the-scenes video of the filming process of the film “Fast X”

Flying RED Komodo for dynamic FPV supercar pursuit

Hob­by­ist FPV drone spe­cial­ist John­ny Schaer (also known as John­ny FPV) while cur­rent­ly film­ing Fast X in Italy post­ed this short video show­ing one of his work­ing FPV drones (Cinelifter type) in tan­dem with the RED Komo­do cam­era, which in turn is one of the most pop­u­lar cin­e­ma cam­eras used by pro­fes­sion­als for film­ing with FPV drones. The Komo­do has the per­fect form fac­tor to make it easy to mount on a drone, it’s rel­a­tive­ly afford­able (in case of a crash), and it has a glob­al shut­ter that allows you to shoot fast-mov­ing sub­jects while min­i­miz­ing the appear­ance of var­i­ous kinds of arti­facts in the frame, such as jel­ly.

For ref­er­ence: John­ny is far from a novice and has already man­aged to light up as a pro­fes­sion­al on the set of the Net­flix film Red Notice, where, in fact, he made his debut in pro­fes­sion­al cin­e­ma. His path begins in 2015, with the usu­al freestyle, clas­sic 5‑inch quad with a GoPro on board. Now it’s reach­ing the big screen. With what we con­grat­u­late him! What’s more, this is the first use of aer­i­al FPV in the Fast & Furi­ous auto­mo­tive saga.

Cinelifter drone from Jon­ny FPV in tan­dem with RED Komo­do on the set of Fast and Furi­ous 10.

Komodo or ALEXA?

When perus­ing the Fast X data sheet on IMDB, the RED Komo­do cam­era is not list­ed. In its place, such cam­era mod­els as Arri Alexa Mini LF and Arri Alexa LF are indi­cat­ed. It is also known that the main direc­tor of the saga “Fast and the Furi­ous” Justin Lin (Justin Lin), along with his part­ner in cin­e­ma, Stephen F. Win­don (Stephen F. Win­don), prefers to shoot on film (Panav­i­sion XL2). Hence, it will be inter­est­ing to see how the RED Komo­do per­forms with such advanced hard­ware.

For ref­er­ence: Prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy for Fast X began in April 2022 and is sched­uled for release in May 2023.