The frozen forest from above
Sunrise after the first hard frost, the drone straight up and batteries kept warm.
The first hard frost of the winter turned a whole forest white overnight. Jonah flew the drone at sunrise, straight up above the treetops, and filmed twenty-eight seconds of frozen branches from directly above.
Chapters
- 0:00 Above the canopy
- 0:10 Rising slowly
- 0:20 The whole forest
The blue hour
The colour is real, and it is the reason we went at that time. Just before and after sunrise on a cloudy winter morning, snow reflects the blue of the sky. Twenty minutes later, the light turned grey and flat, and the magic was gone.
Flying in the cold
Drones and cold weather do not like each other. Batteries lose power quickly below freezing, and a battery that shows forty percent can suddenly drop to zero. We kept every battery inside our jackets until the moment it went into the drone, flew for only ten minutes per battery instead of the usual twenty, and landed with plenty to spare.
In the cold, a drone battery is a promise it might not keep.
Jonah Mills
Straight down
Most aerial films look forward, towards the horizon. This one looks straight down, which turns the forest into a pattern. Without a horizon, the brain stops seeing trees and starts seeing texture: lace, coral, frost on a window. The slow rise adds a sense of discovery, as more and more of the pattern appears.
Settings
We filmed with the exposure set slightly darker than the camera suggested. Snow fools a camera's light meter into thinking the scene is too bright, so it makes everything grey. Setting it darker by hand keeps the snow white and the shadows blue.
The edit
The film is one continuous flight of twenty-eight seconds. The drone starts about thirty metres above the trees and rises to about sixty, slowly enough that the movement feels like breathing. We added a very slow push in the edit, a gentle zoom of about five percent, so the rise and the zoom work against each other and the forest seems to float. The sound is wind in the trees, recorded from the ground, and nothing else.
A short window
By nine o'clock, the sun had come out and the frost had started to fall from the branches. By ten, the forest was green and brown again. If we had come an hour later, there would have been no film.