Hiding one dumpster from a drone took three of us twenty minutes

Developer on a small infill project, eleven units, wanted marketing footage before the last two buildings were framed. So the shoot got scheduled for a Thursday and my job was to make the site look finished from 120 feet up.

The dumpster was the problem. Full, couldn't be hauled that morning, and sitting in the exact spot the flight path needed for the approach shot. We ended up dragging construction fence panels with green mesh around three sides of it and parking a truck on the fourth. From the ground it looked ridiculous. In the footage you can't see it.

Other things that came out of that day. The pilot wouldn't fly until the crew was off the roof, so I lost half a day of labor on two guys waiting in a truck. He needed the sprinklers off because wet concrete photographs like a stain. And he asked me to sweep the sidewalk approach, which I thought was fussy until I saw the ground level dolly shot and the whole frame is that sidewalk.

The part I misjudged was reuse. I thought this was one video. The developer has been cutting it into fifteen second pieces for a year, and the same aerial has shown up in a lender package and on a leasing page. That reframed what the day cost. I was thinking of it as a marketing expense against eleven units and it turned into the visual library for everything that project does.

Still sweeping sidewalks for a camera though.