Drone Upgrade by Stark Industries

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It was day 10, of the Corona Virus, stay-at-home recommendations with only essential businesses to remain open. Since drone work is non-essential for the most part, I am staying home with the rest of my family.  My wife was/is working remotely, downstairs in her new living room/cubicle…she is very busy, as her job requires it, especially at this time.  My only child at home is a sophomore in college and is self-isolated in her room with online classes.  So I am left with the dogs and the cat,  as my new best friends and a lot of time on my hands.

I started thinking of what to do with this extra time.  I knew better than to complain to my wife, that I was bored. I would have a long Honey Do List in a matter of minutes.  I thought about all of the cool things, that I always wanted to create on the computer but would use the excuse of not having enough time.  Well…no excuses now!

I have literally, hours of drone footage stored on multiple hard drives.  I recently purchased a very large plugin package from Red Giant, called Red Giant Complete and access to all of Adobe’s creative tools.  So, I got my “assets” in gear and away I go…

Genesee Street, Utica NY

So I decided to give my DJI Mavic Pro drone a Stark Industries (Iron Man) upgrade. I took some footage that I captured back in 2018, of Genesee Street in Downtown Utica, NY.  This was from a featured video I was doing about downtown Utica.  In this clip,   I flew almost straight down the main boulevard, at about 300 ft AGL (Above Ground Level).  A drone, at that height, is not very action-packed.

Well, I could not have any of that… for this UPGRADE animation!  I imported a jet fighter cockpit image, as an overlay on top of the video.

Jet cockpit ovedrlay for animation

It looked cool but it just wasn’t quite Tony Stark material.  I needed more excitement in this animation besides just a cool overlay. I added several techno/computer screen instrument panel animations, a HUD targeting animation, and some HUD information text across the cockpit window. I also added a few soundtracks as background noise.  Then, I threw in some Adobe After Effect animation techniques to speed things up a little, added a few banking maneuvers, and 5 hours later,  it was finished.