Over the past few weeks, I’ve been really busy with some new projects, and fortunately, they have mostly been right here in Western North Carolina, just a short drive from home. I really enjoyed getting out and exploring the surrounding counties, tracking down and identifying 8 properties to capture photos and video of. This set of properties ranged from just under 3 acres to over 32 acres and were located in Graham, Swain, and Jackson counties.
The prep work for this took a little more than usual, to be sure that I was at the right locations on each of these visits. Plotting dozens of GPS coordinates, saving Google Maps for offline use, and printing out copies for each location, since my experience with maintaining a cell connection in the region is spotty, at best. But, utilizing the offline maps and simply having some cell connection (and being able to tether my iPad Mini 6) was enough to keep me on track.
A few of the properties needed to be explored a bit more to find and capture footage of the natural springs that the client wanted to make sure he could market in the videos and photos. The largest property, over 32 acres in Jackson County, also had over 2800 acres of National Forest Lands as its “backyard!” I spent a few hours at this property, walking to all the corners, and found the National Forest Boundary markers on several trees along the property line. It was a little sketchy flying the drone back there, but getting the aerial 360 views from up there was a must, and well worth the anxiety of the drone props clipping a branch as it broke through the canopy.
After flying and shooting many of these vacant parcels of land for marketing video content, I’ve become a little more comfortable finding my way up through the trees to fly in the open sky, but it never makes me feel any easier about it. This time of year is really the only time it’s feasible where I can maintain visual line of sight (VLOS) on the drone once it makes it above the treeline. Even then, my field of view for flying is still limited which make flying cinematic maneuvers a little more challenging.
All that said, I believe the week of exploring the mountains and the resulting photos and videos created for the client, was successful, and I’m planning the next set of property visits as soon as I finish this post. I hope you enjoy a few of the videos from this past project and if you are looking to have similar marketing content created for your investment property, rental, or home to be listed for sale, please email us at ctranchina@walkingdogproductions.com to discuss.
You can find more from this recent project as well as others from around the region on my Vimeo Showcase page.