'Animals' Makes Drone Photography Unforgettable, but It Isn't Necessary

IndieWire Talks to Cinematographers on the Benefits and Overuse of Drone Footage

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There is a fine art to doing cityscape b-roll and creating photos. "Insecure" is great at that. "Hacks" is really good at it, too — in part because DP Adam Bricker and his longtime colleague Charlie Panian perfected the craft on "Chef's Table." The transition to a drone for a scary wide shot in "Youth" at the end of a 40-minute game is kind of legendary.

Unfortunately, as technology becomes more versatile—the easier it is to achieve wider vistas, amazing angles, and epic ranges—it's becoming easier for photos to be taken about as easily as an empty takeout container on a bus. Even when Gillian Anderson is driving that bus, to paraphrase the metaphor, cinematography can only do so much to engage viewers in a story if its visual style is dangerously close to a smart TV screensaver. RELATED STORIES Audiences want to see documentaries about Gaza, Israel and Palestine - why are distributors still afraid? "The Magician's Brother" Trailer: A Stairway to Narnia That Only Greta Gerwig Could Make

Sweeping a drone over a sun-drenched location is a big temptation, especially when the story beat requires a sense of scale or landscape. Doing so is logistically relatively economical. But for Hutchens and his team on Showtime's "Murder on the Big Horn," embedding the audience in the story had to be combined with an emotional resonance that moves the story forward as well — and he found the right way to do that by relying on the limitations of the land.

"The terrain is very important on a lot of those reservations, and the whole history of that plays a big role in how things are to this day. You want to get a sense of the scenery. But that part of Montana is very flat, and it's a little hard to get [the height] and the perspective," Hutchens told IndieWire. What we decided to do was put the camera on a full, heavy drone, lift it up to 400 feet, and use it as a tripod there.

"With these fixed landscapes, we really looked at some of these irregular shapes and lines and things that were cutting through the land," Hutchens said. You don't want to feel like, "Okay, one shot is coming from another drone." This is overuse. "I think any time you can change a tool, at least the norm, and work with it in a way that's far from what's expected, I think that helps."

Still, filmmakers always need time and encouragement to reinvent themselves with conventional means, especially in the documentary world, which Hutchens does a lot of. His work suggests that almost all documentarians would prefer to make more realistic films, but it's hard for networks to pay for the time and attention and mountain of footage it requires. "It's really difficult to do custom work that way," Hutchens said.

"A lot of heavy drone stuff looks the same and you could say it's filler," Wilson told IndieWire. "And I just realized that it doesn't connect very well with imaging. You're almost using, you know, something that AI can make, you know? It doesn't have much of a human element to it, and you're relying on this machine to bring you this image, which is ultimately just screen saver material."

Sometimes the mechanical, inhuman feel of the technological gadgets is a deliberate choice — “Severance” director Jessica Lee Gagné adjusts the show’s pattern to give the camera inside Lumon HQ a smooth, mechanical, surveillance feel, for reasons the series makes clear. But drones, when used in the right moment and not overused, can also bring deep and human emotions.

That's exactly what cinematographer Matthew Lewis achieves at the end of the second episode of "Teenagers," with a drone that brings the camera from the school the police are investigating to the crime scene/memorial where the murder took place. "My real concern was that the camera has its own," Lewis told IndieWire about the series.

But Lewis says that justifying the camera movements through human behavior and tics also made the drone exhibit a sharp and bitter exhalation. "If it's an action scene, it's very impressive to do a sequence with a lot of stunts," Lewis said. “You know, there's this constant relief and release, there's an explosion, that justifies why we're still here. There's a shooting, so that explains why we're still here. "It's in the breaks and the pauses and the quiet moments, where you think you should, but you can't and you don't know why - that's what's interesting."

It is also what is most human, and doing human work, rather than easy work, may be the healthiest work of the future. You know, “There's a lot of fear about what [filmmakers] are useful in this landscape? If we're creating these robotic images through devices like drones, it looks like we're not that different from machines in certain ways, Wilson said.

Drones could be part of it, but not speeding along the Los Angeles River like "Animals."