Category: Mel

Astro Park in Armagh

Tinker Bell‘s next adventure was going to be the Astro Park in Armagh.  This was actually my first commissioned work.  When Mel was over to see Northern Ireland, we did visit the Planetarium, but it was pouring down so heavily that we grudgingly decided to give the Astro Park a miss.  Mel hence requested that I get Tinks to make a nice video instead, so that she can look forward to her next visit when the weather will hopefully be better…

Pre-flight planning with SkyVector and Airmap. I do actually miss the “everything in one App approach” from Hover, but since it has proven unreliable, I do not really have a choice in the matter.

Video feed this time observed on my iPad rather than my iPhone, and indeed the feed was much more reliable and smoother, proving that my previous problems were not with the DJI Remote Controller, but with the limited memory and processing power of my iPhone.

Edited in iMovie on my MacBook Pro.

Dundrum Castle

Tinks next outing was a planned one. Looking for a strongly three-dimnensional object to celebrate Mel’s first visit to Northern Ireland, I was going through the list of ruined castles in the Province, and Dundrum Castle in County Down ― not to be mistaken for its namesake in County Dublin ― came up as a strong candidate.

After a short drive, we arrived to find the castle sitting beautifully overlooking Dundrum Bay and the Mourne Mountains. There were a few visitors, but enough space to fulfil the 30-meters-separation requirement for take-off and landing required by law, and the groundkeeper who was mowing the lawn had no objections to flying drones ― apparently it is done quite frequently there. So, with a clear conscience, Tinks took off and shot the following footage:

Dundrum Castle was constructed by John de Courcy, a Norman invader. The exact date is unknown, but he launched his invasion in 1177, and was ousted in 1204, so the castle must have been constructed between those two dates. It is thus closely related to Carrickfergus Castle, and must have been constructed shortly after the latter’s completion.

The castle withstood the siege of Hugh de Lacy during his struggle for dominance with John de Courcy, but was conquered by King John of England in 1210, who added the central round keep. The latter is unique in Northern Ireland, and is tactically and strategically superior to the square keeps other Irish castles featured at the time ― in 1210, it was cutting-edge defence technology. In all likelihood, Welsh masons had to be brought in ― presumably by King John ― to implement this in Ireland until-then unknown type of fortification.

The castle remained in English hands until the Parliamentarians withdrew from it in 1652 for reasons unknown. My best guess would be that with the Irish Confederate Army defeated, the Parliamentarians no longer saw a strategic requirement to hold the castle. With the war won, continuing to maintain the castle was presumably deemed unjustifiably expensive. The withdrawing Parliamentarian troops demolished the castle upon their departure, presumably to prevent Irish rebels from taking possession of the empty castle and turning it into one of their strongholds.

A mansion was later built sometime after 1660 to the South of the ruined castle, but anecdotal evidence has it that the owners overexerted themselves financially in the venture, and went bankrupt before the mansion could be completed. The mansion fell into disrepair and was ruined sometime between then and the early 19th century.

The movie was manually edited in iMovie again after I decided to abandon Quik. As a result, the movie is much longer than the previous two. In spite of annoying me in many ways, Quik did have the one advantage of forcing me to keep my videos short and concise. In future, I may try a mix-and-match approach, where I probably pre-edit the movie in iMovie, but then use Quik to shorten it.

I also have decided to play completely by the rules now, and only use royalty-free background music ― on this occasion “Evil Twin” by Movie Theatre. While I personally think that current copyrights are too harsh on people who use for non-commercial purposes a copy of a song they have legally acquired and paid for, the bottom line is that whether I agree with it or not, it is against the rules…

Gilford’s Abandoned Linen Mill

When I left the Philippines to return to my job, Mel was very sad to see Tinker Bell go. For consolation, I promised her I would send Tinks to a surprise location back in Northern Ireland, to shoot her a video. This has a long tradition between us, as Mel has always been curious about Northern Ireland and our strange traditions ― like seasons (!!!) ― so I tended to send her videos from my dashcam before Tinks entered our lives.

The surprise location I came up with was Gilford’s abandoned Linen Mill. The first mill was built at 1841, and the site had since rapidly grown ― and Gilford with it ― until the heydays of linen milling in the 1880s. Strangely enough, it is not fully known when the current building was constructed other than sometime between 1841 and 1880. Following the decline of the linen industry, the mill eventually closed in 1986, and its fate has been bickered over ever since.

The work one can see that has been done to the roof and windows was in preparation of the mill being turned into the Outlet retail center, now renamed as the Boulevard. However, GML Estates ― the company behind the original plans ― changed the location from the mill to the current site in Banbridge when the latter became available, and now the fate of the mill is up in the air again.

Aircraft control via DJI Remote, and edited with iMovie on my MacBook Pro. Again, editing is minimal, the video pretty much shows the flight as flown.

St Thomas Aquinas Parish Church

The next flight was the first one not done entirely to check out the drone, and practice piloting. It is my strong belief that the visually most interesting objects for drone flights should have a strongly three-dimensional character. This way, the drone’s ability to explore these objects in three dimensions leads to a viewer experience that cannot be replicated by any other means. If the object can be fully covered by just walking along it, what is the point of unleashing a drone in the first place…?

With this view in mind, I nearly instantly had my eyes on St Thomas Aquinas Parish Church in Mangaldan, by far the highest building in the area, and with a nice open area in front of it which directly borders the public park.

I used Hover to confirm that I was not in a No-Fly Zone. There were no immediately obvious “Don’t Fly Drones” signs, and the place was reasonably empty. As for the Parish itself, there was nobody obvious around I could have asked for permission, and given that Filipinos are usually quite open to new technology, I hoped that nobody would take offence and launched Tinkerbell…

Control was still with my iPad, so I continued to be limited by its range, and some of the jerking towards the end of the video is caused by temporary loss of control to the drone. Recovery of the drone was by gesture control, which worked surprisingly well.

Edited in iMovie on my iPad.

San Fabian Public Beach

Tinker Bell‘s next flight was to be on San Fabian Public Beach. It was really yet another test flight, since my personal belief is that a drone only really comes into its own when exploring three-dimensional objects, yet a beach is about as two-dimensional as it gets….

Nevertheless, the mountains around Baguio provided a great backdrop, and the drone rising up over the beach gives a sense of scale, and an idea why I like Philippine beaches so much: Their scale, and the fact that they are not all sold out to resort hotels. I am vastly opposed to mass-tourism, and will never understand while people travel half-way around the planet to be in a place that is deliberately isolated from the local culture, to be with people from their own country, and eat and drink the same foodstuff as at home…

As you can see, I still used the iPad as a controller for this flight, and it’s limited range limited what I could do with Tinker Bell on this occasion. The movie was edited on iMovie on my iPad.

The flight also quite undeniably shows another danger of drone flights. Tinker Bell shows the increasingly desperate state of my cranial hair in a much more blunt and brutal way than any selfie ever could…

Tinker Bell’s First Flight ― The Sunken Garden in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines

After lengthy debate, and investigating a lot of potential sites, we finally decided on the Sunken Garden in Quezon City as the site for the first flight.  While it was unlikely to provide the most stunning of visuals, our thought was that Tinker Bell would be easy to retrieve if she crashed, and that there was relatively limited prospect of causing serious damage in case of pilot error.

The flight was successful, but we instantly learned the first lesson:  Do not take off if there is an overhead obstruction, as otherwise the drone will struggle to return to the landing site ― as it is programmed to do ― if it loses connection to the controlling device.

This flight predates the purchase of my remote control, so I used the DJI GO 4 App on my iPad to control Tinker Bell.  The controls worked fine, but it was also instantly clear that the range of the iPad of about 50 m was not even remotely adequate for my intended purposes, and a remote control was purchased shortly thereafter…

We used the Hover app to check whether flying a drone in the Sunken Garden was allowed.  I very much liked the functionality of the Hover app, but about half a year later found out that its knowledge of No-Fly Zones is patchy at best, and so I now use SkyVector to determine whether or not I can legally fly Tinker Bell in a given area.

Edited on iMovie on my iPad.