I don’t do a lot of ship photography. I mainly shoot a lot of interiors and architecture. Eagle Bulk were had one of their new vessels coming to Port Elizabeth and they were quite keen to get some images and a short video clip of the vessel loading cargo at harbour. Their brief was simple, they were looking for some aerial shots and some drone video footage of the vessel. As I purely work with stills and dont have the necessary drone equipment or permits I needed the help of a company who would be able to fulfill the brief and could deliver top quality work.
Through my years of editing and managing other photographers image libraries I made some calls and one of my clients who is in the field of videos and drone work wasn’t able to help me but he put me in contact with another local company who specialised in drone videography and had the necessary permits.
Skyhook were extremely professional and from the stuff I had seen online I knew they’d be able to tackle the job and delivery excellent footage. They had recently completed an ad for Nedbank CIB which was all over the tv.
I chatted with Skyhook over the phone and email and set about briefing them about what needed to be shot. I wasn’t planning on going to Port Elizabeth with them, so I needed to put a lot of trust in their hands. They knew exactly what permits and permissions they needed for Ports Authority. We needed permission from the Port Elizabeth Film Office as well as the Port Elizabeth Harbour Master. Tony advised me this could take almost two weeks, if not longer to organise. We had less than a week. We also needed to hope the weather would up for us. The vessel was only going to be in port long enough to load it’s cargo and then it would be sailing again. This gave Tony and his team two days with one evening to get all the necessary footage.
Tony and his team agreed to liaise with the Harbour Master and captain and headed up to Port Elizabeth by car. They were back in Cape Town two days later with 500gb worth of footage. One of their questions before leaving was they wanted to know what the footage was going to be used for. This would determine what equipment they would need to take to Port Elizabeth. Because the ship photography footage was to be used mainly for training purposes and web, Tony opted to take the DJI Inspire 2 drone.
I decided that I would edit the footage into a 1 minute clip, and would edit the stills. Just over a week later the final footage and stills was handed over to Eagle Bulk who seemed genuinely happy with the final product.
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