I Went to the First Drone Film Festival and There Was a Lot of Dubstep
​Photo: Ryan Schaeffer

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I Went to the First Drone Film Festival and There Was a Lot of Dubstep

The shining star of drone filmmaking is 'Superman with a GoPro.'

I've been to drone meetups before. I know the drill. You take a subway to the end of the line and then walk 15 minutes to an ​empty park where a group of men wearing technical outerwear are checking the charge on their lipo batteries and talking about range extenders. It's at least another 45 minutes until a drone goes airborne, by which point, if it's winter, you're convinced you have frostbite. If it's summer, you will get sunburned.

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But last Saturday night I attended a different drone meetup. For one evening, anoraks were set aside for suits and cocktail dresses, and the lipo batteries were tucked out of sight. Though FPV kits were still a hot topic of conversation, it was polite conversation, over that weird boxed water that everyone seems to drink these days.

This was the New York City Drone Film Festival, the first of what organizers hope will become the Oscars of drones, an opportunity for droners to lay down their remote controls and be honored for their work.

The Festival took place in the Director's Guild Theatre on West 57th St, in Midtown Manhattan (a strict no-fly zone). The main sponsor was NBC News. When I arrived, the red carpet—yes, red carpet—was buzzing. Photographers were vying to get shots of hobbyists and filmographers posing in their suits and fedoras. Elegantly dressed guests bounced around the mezzanine, kissing each other on both cheeks the way socialites do. I wondered for a second whether I had the wrong address. As a journalist and researcher mostly writing on drones, it had never occurred to me that I'd one day find myself on a red carpet. I considered stopping one of the droners to ask him who, uh, he was wearing, but wisely thought against it.

The Travel category, which felt like the longest, was all about how people with drones have unlimited travel budgets

We made our way into the theatre, which can seat over 400 people. The event was sold out. After a series of ads for GPC hardshell cases and Paralinx WiFi kits, Randy Slavin, the festival's organizer, jumped on stage to much whooping from the audience. "Everybody," he said, "is all about drones."

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A drone cinematographer himself, Slavin had conceived of the festival, he has said in numerous interviews, as much as a way to celebrate drone films as a platform to tell the world that drones are good, and that the ​pushback from lawmakers and concerned citizens is misplaced. When I called him a couple of days after the festival, he told me that had just been out flying his drone. "I just really like flying, he said, "and I feel strongly about the community and am very intent on helping it in the best way I can."

The screening was scheduled to take three hours. I made a quick mental calculation for how much EDM I was about to hear. For some reason, the kind of music I thought was cool—kind of—when I was a freshman in college has become something of a default in drone videos, to the extent that one forgets that a drone doesn't actually sound like a Skrillex song. Perhaps that's the fault of Raphael "Trappy" Pirker and his Team Black Sheep, whose pace-setting drone videos are often scored with some form of ​brain-crushing rave ballad.

I also wondered whether it was even possible to watch 200 minutes of sweeping aerial footage on a gigantic cinema screen without getting serious motion sickness. The first video, Pipeline Winter, opened with a fierce oblique shot of a giant wave in Hawaii dotted with surfers. The track, called Crystalize, started to rise toward that inevitable dubstep drop.

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The 35 films on show were split into seven categories, which Slavin admitted the organizers had invented post-submissions in order to better reflect the diversity of styles in droning.The Architecture category flexed the knack drones have for making buildings look beautiful (the winner in the category, Fallout, an aerial tour of Chernobyl that made headlines earlier this year, was a spooky visual treat). The Travel category, which felt like the longest, was all about how people with drones have unlimited travel budgets: it jumped from New Zealand to the Galapagos to an Island off the coast of Thailand. There was even a category for Dronies, the neoneologism for selfies taken with a drone.

Between categories, Slavin raffled out about a dozen camera-equipped micro-drones. The man sitting beside me (wearing a fedora) let out a huff of disappointment each time his number wasn't called.

The X-Factor category seemed to bring together films that were all variously impressive, if all for different reasons. The winning entry, OK Go's music video for I Won't Let You Down, wowed mostly with its astounding mass choreography. A video shot inside an exploding volcano was a tremendous show of the pilot's ability to dodge hot lava, and his willingness to risk losing his Phantom drone. I suspect that Mexico City International Airport from Above, which won the Audience Choice award, was lauded as much for its fantastic close-quarters shots of airliners taking off and landing as for the fact that the guy who made it managed to get permission to fly over an active airport in the first place.

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The standout in an otherwise thin Narrative category was Superman with a GoPro. In it, Superman straps a GoPro to his head and films adventures around LA. It won, unsurprisingly, both the the category and Best In Show.

While certainly a testament to how far this technology has come in the past few years, the festival was also a reminder that, as a field, droning still has much room to grow. If the intention in the selections was to reflect the current drone zeitgeist, I think it did that well. The thing is, the current drone zeitgeist is pretty narrow, even if the shots are wide. A smooth, showy, light-drenched aesthetic predominated. It reminded me a bit of the socialites I had seen in the lobby. I am told that the organizers didn't accept drone videos that weren't made with a gimbal, a gyroscopic mount for the camera that is kind of like a Steadicam for a drone, which is a shame because a lot of good work, especially in the arts world, has been achieved with with gimbal-less drones (for example, Trappy's videos). "Eye candy" is how one attendee described the selection to me. Just as on YouTube, where a drone video of fireworks last year hit several million views in a matter of days, the wow factor was privileged above all other factors.

When we look back at the Festival in a couple of decades, or even a couple of years, I have a feeling that the films will seem a little crude and unimaginative. They might just end up in the history books as the silent era cinema of the drone world, even though they tend to be anything but silent. There was, just as I had predicted, a lot of EDM. As I walked out on to 57th St eating an NYCDFF cupcake, my ears were ringing. I wondered what one of these videos would look like if it were set to Bill Evans instead.

When I talked to Slavin on the phone, he seemed to agree that drone cinema still hasn't hit its full potential. "I expect all the films to be way better next year," he told me, before adding that this wasn't to say that the films this year didn't impress him. "Everybody was just shooting for clients or for themselves," he explained.

His thinking is that as the field of drone filmography evolves, there will be more frameworks like festivals by which to measure works against each other, and droners will push beyond the current EDM/gimbal/eyecandy/surfing-in-Vanuatu paradigm.

The drone pilots have now returned to their chilly outer-borough parks (some of them with drones that they won at the festival), and plans are already underway for the next NYCDFF. "For me to not do it again would be ridiculous," Slavin told me. Somewhere in Queens, someone might already be at work on next year's winning entry, and it might be unlike anything we've seen before. "Who knows what we're going to see in the future?" said Slavin. "Can it get much better than Superman with a GoPro? I'm sure it will."