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.
RC Test Flight
The next flight was to be yet another test flight, this time to try out my new DJI remote controller for Tinker Bell. As I hoped, range is much improved, however it is still strictly line of sight only. I wonder if the larger drones have the actual control circuit on a different frequency, e.g. similar to remote-controlled airplanes, to achieve better control and range.
Anyway, this requirement for having line-of-sight with the drone at all times will require future flights to be carefully planned, and require more editing of the videos, to cut out times when the drone was stationery awaiting me to get to a new vantage point, in order to maintain line-of-sight for the next planned leg of the flight.
Edited on iMovie, initially on my iPad, then handed over to my MacBook Pro. To my surprise, the handing over of the project from one device to the other went reasonably smoothly, only minor edits were needed afterwards. Since this was only a test flight, editing was very light, and the flight is pretty much presented as flown…
One other thing I noticed about the remote control is that while the range is much improved, the video feed not necessarily so. I wonder if this is due to the fact that the remote only works with my iPhone, but not my iPad. My iPhone is quite an old model, with limited memory and processor power, so it may just not be able to stream a high-quality video stream in real-time. At some point I will have to look into this and investigate further.
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…
[OT] The Coast of Northern Luzon
This post admittedly has nothing to do with drones, but instead is a little collage of videos I shot travelling along the West Coast of Luzon, the main island of the Philippines. The first half of the movie shows footage going westwards from Mangaldan to Los Alaminos, the second half is shot the following day going eastwards from Mangaldan into the mountains around Baguio.
Since I am a seafarer, travel videos will probably also feature somewhat prominently in this blog. If you are only interested in the drone footage, filter for the tag “Drone Flights”… No, there is no actual point to this video, it just shows impressions from a country that I find fascinating.
The footage actually predates the purchase of Tinker Bell, but I only managed to edit the video at a later date. I would love to unleash Tinker Bell onto those mountains at a future date, the result I believe would be visually stunning…
Filmed mostly on my GoPro Hero 4, and a few shots on my iPone SE. Edited in iMovie on my iPad due to lack of time, but have to say that iMovie has actually become really good, stable, and usable. My initial intention had been to renew my subscription for Final Cut, but have now reconsidered, as
- Final Cut has become very expensive, now that the Express version is no longer available, and
- iMovie is doing the job just fine for the very amateur level editing I am doing at the moment…
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.
Tinker Bell's Adventures 