Drone Light Painting – The Christmas Edit

Watch the world’s first Drone Light Painting Video “The Christmas Edit”. With this film Ascending Technologies wishes to express its sincere gratitude to all drone enthusiasts and operators, friends, customers and partner companies. Moreover we wish you a Merry Christmas and a good takeoff into a successful New Year. The complete Light Painting project was performed by use of a modified AscTec Falcon 8 UAS drone.

The World’s First Drone Light Painting Video

height=350

The Drone Light Painting Video is world’s first drone light painting project of that quality. For this purpose a high-tech drone mounted with a LED was controlled by the flight planning software AscTec Navigator. After some testing all the light painting flights could be performed quite quickly and fully automated.

Due to the excellent flight characteristics of the AscTec Falcon 8 it was possible to fly such complex lines through predefined waypoints as precise and to fly those flight paths several times with such accuracy. Actually all paintings of the Drone Light Painting Video – if Santa Claus and the reindeer sleigh, present with loop, Christmas tree with a big star, writings and snowflakes – have been produced with an AscTec Falcon 8including AscTec Trinity control unit.

The moves of the LED drone were shot while taking a long exposure photograph of every scene. Up to 10 minutes exposure time were needed. Additionally the flights have been filmed with an A7S Mark ii. In post processing the stills from the original drone flights were visualized via VFX and combined with further video footage.

Incredible but true: Each painting is based on a real drone flight. The Drone Light Painting Video is no fake.

The Drone Light Painting flights have been performed at airspeeds of 2 m/s with the patented V-Form Octocopter AscTec Falcon 8. Santa Claus throwing the presents into the chimneys and the snowflakes in the starting sequence of course are animated GIFs, yet based on flown paintings. Probably it was possible to do any drone light painting you like.

You can download two original raw long exposure images of the LED drone flights here.