Hold The Front Page

Its Josh Widdicombe and Nish Kumar

One of the absolute joys of flying drones professionally for TV is getting to work with some very funny people and the TV show “Hold The Front Page” on Sky Max was no exception.

My brief was to capture stunning general views of the locations we travelled through on the comics mission to find a headline story for the front page of the local newspapers. https://www.cplproductions.co.uk/production/hold-the-front-page/

It very rarely happened as the boys fumbled around Britain on their quest.

Firstly, lets talk about drone kit.

On Hold The Front Page I used the DJI Mavic 3 Cine as this records in ProRes in beautiful 4K which matched the camera crews Sony FX6 and FX9 cameras perfectly. It’s important that before any job you always speak to the DOP about file formats and ask if they need the files in Log or as Rec 709. Log or in our case DLog is where the camera shots a flat image with hardly any colour but with a high dynamic range where the editor can control the final colours as they grade the footage.

Rec 709 is classed as a normal colour setting on the DJI Mavic 3 and is where the image looks nice and colourful straight out of the aircraft.

For the more technical drone pilots out the I always fly with the white balance fixed, there’s no way I can use auto white balance as the shift in colour when you go from a head down to a sky shot us unacceptable when in the edit.

Also, you must check what frame rate you should be at with the DOP, generally its 25fps with a shutter speed of 50^th sec then using the iris to get the perfect exposure when looking at the waveform or the histogram.

You might need to pop an ND filter on in bright conditions to keep the exposure down to the sweet spot. I usually never have the aperture fully close its usually around the f5.6 / F8 mark

But remember this will change constantly when the light gets sunnier, or a cloud comes over.

My advice is to know the technical side of photography inside out before you even learn to fly. Never fly in full auto, it just doesn’t cut it.

In my drone kit bag is always spare equipment and, in this case, I had a DJI Mavic 3 Pro, DJI Mavic Mini3 Pro, the DJI Mavic 3 Cine and to top it of a DJI Inspire 2 with a full set of prime lenses.

To keep the vast number of batteries topped up I have a Ecoflow Mini power bank in my 4×4 which can be topped up from the car whilst travelling and then at night given a full charge along with the batteries.

The director, Tom Levinge expects to see the shots as I am flying so the RC Pro controller connects to my 7-inch Black Magic directors monitor via HDMI. This works great as it has no lag on the picture and no interference from the other ground cameras who are using WiFi on their monitors.

Now to the shoot.

I worked on both series One and Two of Hold The Front Page filming all over the United Kingdom from Devon to Scotland.

Some of the locations were relatively close to my home base of Halifax in West Yorkshire, places such as Blackpool, Preston and Leeds whilst others such as Edinburgh were a good few hours away.

All locations had very comprehensive risk assessments to ensure the safety of the public and the crew, with our insurance increase to £10m just to be on the safe side and recommended by the production company CPL.

The production company usually gains landowners permission but it’s my job to get permission from any closed off airspace and in this case, I had to deal with Blackpool Airport whilst filming at Blackpool Pleasure Beach and the Police in Plymouth when filming next door to the Plymouth Argyle Football stadium on a match day.

I must say they were both very accommodating and helped immensely especially the police.

Filming days are always long and one such day was filming in Scotland starting at 5am in Edinburgh capturing the sunrise and then on to West Scotland, Tarbert to capture the ferry crossings. A full on 15 four day with a lot of driving in between but the views were simply stunning and worth all the effort.

As you’ll see from the photos there was lots going on and the usual filming chaos, but I wouldn’t change a thing.

Life as a creative drone pilot is just the best job in the world!