Wide lens: a large and rolling field of corn stretches across your screen. Cut to a cow hanging out with 15-20 of her friends in a pen next to their barn. Enter the drone footage: fields of corn, fields of pumpkins, fields of beans, cow barns, egg farms, dairy barns, silos. Then you spot a house. As we continue flying toward the village at the center of town fields turn to homes and yards and small businesses and the school. All of a sudden there’s a big, ugly FastTrack being all red and obnoxious in the heart of our small farm town. To be fair, only its signs and branding are truly the source of an eye sore because the building itself actually looks quite nice. Across the street sits the much smaller, abandoned cash-only gas station that used supply residents and travelers.
Okay, so that has the potential for some nice imagery but its not exactly a riveting news story that could be better told through the use of drones in journalism.
Currently, there are some stories developing in my little community but not many of them would be good candidates for a drone angle. However, one thing does come to mind at this time of year.
Football.
Much of the news-worthy stories around here are things related to the school and its involvement in the community. And since people love sports and right now we are in the midst of football season, it seems to be just the kind of story to test out the drones. It would be particularly nice given my high school alma mater just got a new turf field. I think that using drones to connect the community with our football team and the other sports teams for that matter, would be a good use of the drones’ capabilities.
Using a drone we could create a content series for the school called Friday Night Live Lights, or something maybe more clever. Each Friday night the drone goes up and catches the game. Logistically, depending on the model, you may need to bring more than one or extra batteries since games can run long. I have seen people use the Facebook live feature using their drone so I think that would be such a cool way to utilize live streams and drones together to share our local sports stories.
I think as the season went on, you would learn the best way to approach streaming the game, whether it was totally continuous or if you took breaks after each quarter or just at half time, etc. I know that during every time out and/or at the end of quarters I would leave the drone facing the score board. When possible I would place the drone so that the score board and the game were both visible.
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