Robot’s Useless Reviews – Drone Footage

Once upon a time, human people stood as still as they possibly could while a thing called a “camera” exposed “photographic” film to light, so as to make an image. If you wondered why those human people always seemed to be scowling in their photos, it’s because holding a smile for the amount of time necessary to create the image was like an endurance event. From there, we went to portable cameras, moving picture cameras, camcorders, GoPros and finally camera-equipped drones.

I skipped some of the details there, but you get it. We started with blurry stills of families fleeing the Dust Bowl, and now we have drone footage of bros skidding through puddles. That’s progress.

Why do we want to peer down from the heavens at an array of Brodys and Chads doing gratuitous damage to finely crafted trails? Well, because we got tired of watching them fly by us from a fixed perspective, and we got mildly nauseous seeing the trail from their POV. It just made sense to try to see these athletically superior man-babies as God sees them, from above.

To be clear and fair, this isn’t a gendered thing. We also get to see girl Chads and even a few non-binary Brodys getting jiggy with a full-suspension shred sled in terrain both rugged and picturesque. But the industry is pretty adamant that all innovation must first be tested on man babies. For all the progress we’ve made, we haven’t made that much progress.

And to further clarify, any parody herein is fully tempered by a sincere enthusiasm for mountain (and gravel) bike footage of athletes who are far more capable than I am. It’s reasonable to assume my skewering of this aspect of the form derives partially from petty jealousy on my part.

When my own best riding is subjected to even rudimentary filming techniques the viewer is left with questions like, “Why am I watching this guy tootle around in the woods?” or “Is he lost?” or even “Is there footage from before he was this tired?” If you got a peek at drone footage of my riding, you’d struggle to discern any movement in the frame, and if you zoomed in, you’d see that tell-tale scowl from those one of those antediluvian daguerreotypes. Where I ride, the emotional Dust Bowl is never far behind.

But getting back to the subject, the one knock I have on the use of drone footage in cycling videos is that it makes the prospect of making ANY cycling content prohibitively expensive and technically complicated for most riders. “Do you even drone, bro?” And why does a young rider need an experienced drone pilot to be able to pitch themselves to potential sponsors? Today’s bikes are expensive already.

Another knock (you knew there wouldn’t be just one) is that not every video needs this perspective. While we’re at it, the slo-mo sequence of the rider patting a freshly built jump with a shovel before launching off it is a trope already so tired it fell asleep in its breakfast cereal. Would-be outdoor film auteurs could probably also spare us the close ups of tires skidding through loose dirt. We get it, you give zero sh*ts about the trail. Too rad.

Drone footage is cool, though.

Sometimes it enhances the video presentation of a great bit of athletic performance. But just as we began by putting astronauts on the moon with a computer equivalent to a cheap digital calculator, and now carry super-computers in our pockets so we can share cat and dog memes with each other, drone footage has gone from helping us search for survivors of tragic mishap, to an airborne pest buzzing over the better tracts of forest the world over.