Holika — the portal

For Holika we treated the drone as another camera in the show rather than a cutaway. The idea was to put the viewer inside it: start above the crowd, cross the stage with the flame jets firing and finish inside the booth, without the point of view ever switching camera.

Flying FPV through structures and across a live stage is different from a conventional aerial flight: the aircraft goes much closer to people and to the show's own elements —the flame jets firing at the exact moment the drone passes isn't chance, it's coordination with the show's technical crew—, so the margin for error shrinks to centimetres, not metres.

A flight like that is prepared before it is shot: route, heights, show timings and crowd safety, rehearsed until every stretch —the climb over the crowd, crossing the stage, entering the booth— lines up with the exact moment in the show it has to happen. Checked with scene detection on the published piece: twelve seconds, one flight, not a single cut.

The result is a single FPV take that sums up the energy of the night in a few seconds and works just as well on social media as inside an aftermovie: it proves, in twelve seconds, what the rest of the work argues more calmly — that the drone can go where no other camera reaches, without the risk behind it ever showing.