Droning on about the Isle of Wight

A couple of months ago, I bought myself a drone. I managed to persuade Mrs Guru that it would be a valuable tool in 'generating content' for this website and she signed it off. I find that using phrases like 'generating content' are more convincing than 'larking around'. 

It's a wonderfully clever thing which seems like it should cost more than a new car considering the way it can hover with precision and whoosh around the sky.

For anyone interested in the technical stuff, I bought a DJI Mini SE Fly More Combo for about £350. It seemed to be the cheapest drone by the market leaders and came with three batteries, each of which last for about 20-30 minutes. It's exceedingly light so there's very little chance of it injuring someone. I had to spend £10 on registering it with the Civil Aviation Authority, took a theory test and bought insurance which was about £30 for a year.

The theory test taught me that I shouldn't fly it whilst drunk as a skunk and shouldn't fly it towards an Air Ambulance. 

And so, I set out on a series of early morning walks around the West Wight. I found that 6am was an excellent time to fly the drone since there was no-one around and I could sneak out whilst the children were asleep. 

In a splurge of new-toy excitement I did some filming at Freshwater Bay, Compton Bay, Shepherd's Chine (near Brighstone), Brook Chine, Tennyson Down, Colwell, Totland and Yarmouth. 

So far, I've had three small disasters including:

1. crash landing the drone on my mother's neighbour's roof. She allowed us to retrieve it by climbing through the window of her en-suite. Mrs Guru was mortified. The children thought it was great fun and followed me onto the roof via her vanity unit.
2. flying it into a tree because I pressed the wrong button on the controls. Some fancier drones have collision avoidance. Luckily it just cut a few leaves and wasn't damaged.
3. losing signal whilst hanging over a particularly high cliff at Tennyson Down. The signal loss was only a few seconds but it was what Sir Alex Ferguson would call 'squeaky bum time'.

After collecting hours of footage, I then had to chop it up as no-one wants to see all my outtakes. 

I settled on Adobe Premiere Elements which is an el-cheapo version of Adobe Premiere Pro. It cost about £50 as a one off, whereas the pro version is a monthly subscription. It suits my needs for now, although I've not compared the two side by side.

My first finished video was Compton Bay, which I jazzed up by making it more of a music video. I spent much time ensuring that every single edit was in time with the music and agonised over the best order in which to present my masterpiece.

"How long would it take to go viral?" I wondered to myself. 

And yet, after a month or so it has had a grand total of 36 views. I would guess that half of those are people with the same surname as me.

This was a little disheartening when videos of people opening Kinder Surprise eggs get around 90 million views. Still, my mother liked it.

My second effort was something more topical. I hacked together my footage of Totland Pier being rebuilt, chose the least annoying piece of free music on the editing software and presented it to the world.

On this occasion, I had much more success, mostly thanks to it featuring in articles by On The Wight, the Isle of Wight County Press and Isle of Wight Radio. 

1000 views is not quite 'viral', but it's better than 36.

After the success of focusing on something specific rather than general nice shots, I went for the landslide in Totland. The music was gradually getting worse, but I hoped no-one would notice.

How's it going? Well, after two days it's had a whopping 13 views, which means that it will equal the 90 million achieved by the Kinder Egg video in around 38,000 years.