If you look at the majority of today's multicopter and aerial footage in general, you will find a lot of very stable, composed, and mechanical-looking footage. As previously described in my post about the FREEFLY MIMIC: stabilizers like the Freefly MoVI or DJI Ronin have become hugely popular in the last few years because they are such simple tools to achieve hyper-stable results. In comparison, a Steadicam rig would need a lot more experience (both balancing and operating) to get solid results - or a dolly would need much more time and manpower to set up and would limit the amount of coverage that could be shot from this one setup.
So here we are - in a time where 3-axis gimbals are accessible to nearly every level of production and have with no doubt changed the cinematography of the 21st century; for better or worse, replacing both steadicams and dollies in a lot of productions. Though I have no doubt that we are just in the beginning - there is still so much more potential yet to come. With the latest MoVI firmware update, FREEFLY opened up doors to use the gimbal as a timelapse remote head - the MIMIC translates real motion into a stabilized system or acts as a camera tracker. How amazing is that?
To get back to the point that I originally wanted to make: aerial footage these days is perfect. Maybe too perfect? The horizon is always perfectly level, shots for the most part are very straight tracking or push-ins without much life or human feel to them - in other words the technical perfection nearly adds to how removed a lot of these shots feel. By adding even slight roll motions in combinations with tilts and pans you can change footage that feels mechanical and distant to something that feels a lot more natural and motivated.
We definitely pushed the roll moves in our piece to a maximum - to further exemplify the imbalance of our modern day world. But shots like these really speak the most to me, where subtle moves change the whole feel of a shot and scene:
