London Helicam - high end aerial cinematography

My friend Ville started helicam.aero in 2011 in the Nordics, sticking one of the best digital cinema cameras (RED epic) on a custom built octocopter, on a gyro stabiliser built by ex-military engineers. I had also been experimenting with drones at the time, so it was a pretty natural to start working together - that was the birth of London Helicam. I had a pretty good contact book from working in advertising in London for a long time, so I started hitting that up and getting gigs in - shooting large infrastructure projects for the government of Saudi Arabia with the Mill, filming surfers in Puerto Rico for Oakley, campaigns for Nike in London, ads for Samsung in India.

The clients loved the service, it was an easy sell - great team of pilots and camera operators, great results. Aside from being a lot of fun and learning about business and sales, grading the footage was also a great experience for me in developing new tonemapping techniques for 6k RED Epic HDRx footage with 18 stops of dynamic range.