Game Day Tailgate Aerials | ESPN
Flying over a tailgate
A college football tailgate is thousands of people spread over acres, and from the ground you can only ever show a corner of it. The whole feeling of the thing is scale. That's a drone problem by definition. It's also a crowd, which is the complicating part. Flying over people carries real responsibility and real rules, and none of the interesting shots are the safe boring ones. So a lot of the work here happens before anything takes off, planning paths that get the shot without ever putting the aircraft somewhere it shouldn't be. Then it's about picking moments. Aerial footage of a crowd goes flat fast unless something is happening in the frame. You're looking for the surge, the reaction, the one section that goes up at once.
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Scale you can only get from up there
ESPN got aerial coverage that shows the size and energy of the tailgate in a way no ground camera can, which is the entire reason to put a drone up over an event like this. It also put STRLGHT footage into a national sports broadcast environment.
