The Salinas Project

Posted on January 12, 2014 by Brook

Filmmaker Carolyn Brown has released a trailer for her upcoming documentary The Salinas Project. I am thrilled that she asked me to contribute aerial videography to the film.

About one hour South of the wealthy Silicon Valley, sits the agricultural, immigrant town of Salinas. On the east side of Salinas, in a neighborhood known as Alisal, deplorable housing conditions and gang violence are part of daily life. But there are big changes happening in the community and a sense of renewal.

Find out more about this film at thesalinasproject.org

DIY Over the Shoulder Camera Rig

Posted on September 2, 2013 by Brook

I built this Third Person View camera rig to wear around Vidcon 2013.

The idea came from a rig that Indy Mogul’s Griffin Hammond wore around the South By Southwest film festival this year.

I was really pleased with the results. The interesting thing about this view is that, unlike many first person view body mounted GoPro rigs where the footage can be quite shakey, this always keeps my head in frame. Giving the viewer something to lock onto and making the footage appear much smoother.

Here is our video from Vidcon 2013

ReplayXD Cameras posts their video of Monster Army Recon in San Jose, CA

Posted on July 26, 2013 by Brook

ReplayXD Cameras posts their video of Monster Army Recon in San Jose, CA While we were out there shooting the event, we did a few flights with their cameras on board.

They used a couple of our aerial shots in the video and an on bike camera gets a quick shot of Brook and the Century NEO 660 in air at about 1:48 into the video.

Skate Park Aerial

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Brook

As I was setting up to fly over the Lake Cunningham Regional Skate Park for The Monster Recon BMX event, a lone skateboarder was bowl riding. I grabbed this shot as I was doing a test flight to size up how high I had to fly to shoot directly down and get the whole bowl into the shot.

I was flying a DJI F550 Hexacopter and shot this with a GoPro Hero2 on the X468 gimbal

FlyTron Infrared RC remote for Sony NEX

Posted on March 3, 2013 by Brook

The FlyTron RC IR Shutter Controller allows you to manually trigger a SONY NEX camera to take photos and start/stop video recording remotely with any standard RC TX/RX controller.

Using it couldn’t be any simpler Just plug it into your any of your RX’s AUX channels. Use a 3 position switch to control your camera

picture of NEX-5n and IR Remote

UP Position: Photo Shot (hold up for continuous shooting
DOWN Position: Video Start/Stop

Make sure that your camera can see the remote’s LED and that you enable “IR remote” mode from your cameramenu before using this device. You can find the remote control menu under DRIVE MODES of your Nex5.

I bought mine at www.flytron.com

The SONY NEX-5n is a great lightweight mirrorless inter-changable lens camera to fly on multi rotor helicopters.

SONY NEX-5n with 16mm lens

2013 San Jose Municipal Rose Garden Pruning Event

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Brook

On January 12th 2013, 375 volunteers participated in the 5th annual Pruning of the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden. The Friends of the Rose Garden asked us to come fly the Hexacopter over the event and provide them with a never before seen view of the event.

The aerial shots in this video were taken with a customized DJI F550 Hexacopter, NAZA GPS flight controller and X468 Gimbal flying a Sony NEX-5N camera. The ground shots were taken by my 14 year old daughter with a Canon T3 DSLR.

The Music was licensed from Kevin MacLeod www.incompetech.com

The Friends of the Rose Garden had seen one of my early test flight videos over the Rose Garden. Looking back at this video my aerial photography has improved quite a bit!

Fall Colors Flight

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Brook

Just a quick tune up test flight of my DJI F550 Hexacopter. I’m posting this video because I liked the fall colors on the trees in my local urban park. There’s no spectacular flying here, just a short test flight as I continue to chase down some vibration issues.

One item of note is that this flight was done with mismatched propellers….. the front and back X props are Graupner E-Props and the port and starboard props are Century Helicopter Glass Fiber. NOT optimal but keeping me in the air while I wait for a propeller order.

The ground camera footage was shot with an iPhone5

DJI F550 Hexa Flight over Calabazas BMX Park

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Brook

We went to Calabazas Park in Cupertino, CA, just for a quick fun fly in an open space…. but we found a really cool BMX park with lots of kids hitting the jumps. Couldn’t resist flying over such a great subject for aerial shots… wish I was flying a camera with a little longer focal length.

The Hexacopter sure got a lot of interest from the kids.

My daughter was operating a Lumix ZS20 point and shoot as a ground camera.

Dain Bramage Films

Projects and Experiments of Brook Dain

Category Archives: Video Production