Sports Day

Sports Day 2017 provided a wonderful first opportunity to test out the functionality of the new done with the careful guidance and supervision of Drone Safe. We set up early, to ensure that we were prepared to capture the different sporting events taking place. The girls' new house coloured sports t-shirts were particularly striking in their contrast with the Astro Turf and this meant the images and videos were visually very impressive. We learnt to capture images from a static location, rotating to capture the movements of the girls, we also practised following the action in a straight line and pre-programmed circle. Filming live action while flying is a real skill and one which will take many more hours of practice to perfect. Ensuring that the action was in the shot, in focus and not overly cropped was particularly challenging while also trying to account for wind changes, low hanging trees and birds (who did not enjoy our filming!). We were pleasantly surprised by the quiet running of the drone, which meant that despite some initial interested from the girls on take-off, that the events were not interrupted by the drone. The girls quickly forgot it was filming them and could participate and support their houses as enthusiastically as ever. Our next challenge will be to ensure we have someone on hand to edit and collate footage collected by the drone as it is very easy to accumulate a vast number of images and lengthy film clips. However, the results look very impressive once collated and edited and we look forward to sharing more material with girls, staff, parents and supporters in the near future.

Some early (and very wobbly!) Sports Day footage from the event