Low & Slow Aerial

The Location and What I Was Going for

I drove out to this reservoir about 40 minutes from my house. I'd driven past it a dozen times and always thought it would make good footage - there's a concrete dam on one end, a lot of open water, and some pine trees along the ridgeline that catch the light really nicely in the late afternoon. My original idea was to do something that felt moody and slow, kind of like those travel films you see on YouTube where everything is grade and smooth and there's some ambient music underneath.

I was shooting with a DJI Mini 3 Pro. I know, I know, it's not the Mavic 3 Cine or anything high end, but it's what I have and honestly the footage it puts out in good light is genuinely solid. I had it set to 4K 30fps with D-Log M enabled so I'd have some room to color grade later. This was actually my first time shooting in D-Log M for a real project and that alone caused me some grief, which I'll get to.

I Actually Tried to Storyboard This One

This was new for me. Usually I just fly around and grab whatever looks cool and then try to edit something out of it afterward. That works for personal stuff but it ends up being this random pile of clips that don't really connect. I watched a few videos about shot planning and decided to sketch out a rough sequence on paper before I left the house.

My shot list ended up being something like: wide establishing pull-back over the water, slow orbit around the dam structure, low pass along the tree line, rise-up reveal of the full reservoir, and a final slow push toward the horizon. Pretty simple stuff. The goal was that each shot would connect to the next logically so the edit would feel like it was going somewhere.

Having that list actually made a huge difference. I wasn't just hovering around trying to figure out what to do next. I had a purpose for each battery. I brought three batteries and it turned out I needed most of them.

The Flying Itself - Smoother Than I Expected, Mostly

One thing I've been working on is slowing down my stick inputs. I have a habit from FPV of being pretty aggressive with the controls and that looks terrible on a camera drone. Like, the footage comes out looking twitchy and rushed. So for this shoot I was deliberately trying to think about moving in long, gradual arcs instead of pointing and going.

The orbit around the dam was the hardest. Getting the subject centered while moving laterally and maintaining altitude is way more coordination than it sounds. On the Mini 3 Pro you can use the automated circle mode, but I wanted to do it manually because I wanted to be able to adjust speed and radius mid-shot. I ended up doing maybe five or six attempts at that shot before I got one that felt controlled all the way through. The early ones had this little wobble where I was overcorrecting.

The low pass along the tree line came out better than I expected. I was flying maybe 15 feet off the ground going pretty slow and the parallax of the trees moving past the camera actually looked really cinematic. That shot ended up being my favorite in the edit.

Where Everything Kind of Fell Apart

Okay so the D-Log M thing. When I loaded the footage into DaVinci Resolve it looked completely washed out and flat, which is normal, but I had no real idea how to grade it. I'd watched some tutorials but watching and doing are very different things. I spent probably three hours trying to get the colors to look right and most of that time I was just pushing things around randomly and making it worse.

Eventually I downloaded a free LUT pack someone had shared in a Mini 3 Pro Facebook group and applied one of those as a starting point. That got me closer. Then I adjusted the exposure and pulled up some of the shadows and it started looking more like what I had in my head. It's not a perfect grade by any stretch but it doesn't look like garbage either, which I'm counting as a win for a first attempt.

The other problem was that I had way too much footage. I shot probably 25 minutes of clips across three batteries and the final video is a minute and forty seconds. That sounds like a good ratio I guess, but the editing process was brutal because I kept second-guessing myself about which version of each shot to use. Note to self: next time take better notes during the shoot about which takes actually felt good in the moment.

The Edit and the Music Problem

I cut everything in DaVinci Resolve. I'm not super advanced in it but I've been using it long enough that I'm comfortable with basic cuts and transitions. I kept the editing pretty simple - mostly straight cuts, one or two very subtle cross dissolves where the pacing needed it.

Finding music was its own whole thing. I needed something royalty free if I was going to post it anywhere and I went through probably two hours of browsing on Pixabay and some other free music sites. A lot of it is just generic and doesn't fit the vibe. I finally found an ambient instrumental track that had the right slow, open feeling and that made a big difference to how the whole thing came together.

The final video is up on my YouTube channel with about eleven views, most of which are probably me checking it. But honestly I'm less interested in views and more interested in the fact that I actually finished something intentional for once.

What I'd Do Differently

Practice color grading before the real shoot, not after. Spend more time on the orbit technique because that's a useful shot I want to get better at. Maybe shoot a shorter project next time so the edit doesn't feel so overwhelming. And I'd probably do a location scout before the actual shoot day just to see how the light falls at different times.

If you're in a similar spot where you fly a lot but haven't really tried to make something with purpose yet, I'd say just try it. The planning part felt awkward and kind of overthought but it genuinely helped. And even when stuff doesn't go perfectly, you learn more from actually finishing a project than from just collecting raw clips forever.

I'll probably post the video link here once I stop cringing every time I watch it.