Cinema Drone Crew for Film and Television

AGL is a cinema drone company flying heavy lift, Inspire 3, FPV, and aerial lighting for film, television, commercials, and live events in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Florida, and Texas.

We came out of a camera movement company, not a drone company. Cinemoves has been putting cameras on cranes, dollies, remote heads, helicopters, and cars on professional sets for nearly thirty years. AGL is what happened when that work went into the air. The people building the rig were on call sheets before drones were.

That order matters. Learning to fly is a season. Learning how a camera department actually works is a career.

Three aircraft, chosen per shot rather than per habit.

• 

  Heavy Lift

  Max payload35 lb

  Freefly Alta X. 35 lb payload budget, 13 minutes typical with a full cinema build. For productions that need the same cinema camera in the air that the ground unit is shooting on.

  Heavy Lift

• 

  Inspire 3

  Recording8K CinemaDNG

  8K RAW, dual operator, nothing to build. For days where the schedule is the constraint.

  Inspire 3

• 

  FPV

  CamerasRED Komodo, Sony FX6

  Close range, fast, through spaces nothing else fits. For action and complex interiors.

  FPV

Payloads

What the aircraft carry, rather than what flies.

• Drone Lighting

  100,000 lumens in the air, repositionable in real time.

  Drone Lighting

• Aerial LiDAR

  Point cloud capture for previz and VFX.

  Aerial LiDAR

The crew. The aircraft is the part anyone can buy.

Every rig we fly is on the open market to whoever has the credit limit. What is not on the market is a team that has spent years on professional sets absorbing how one runs. That is the company. The rest is equipment we happen to own.

By reading the day before the day asks anything of them.

Sets are like water. Everyone has to be fluid. A scene gets cancelled, the AD calls an audible, and suddenly drones are up next. You do not want production looking for the drone crew at crafty.

We work ahead of the AD instead of behind them. In position before the call, ready when it comes, and clear of the floor when the day moves on. Set etiquette is a real skill, and on a professional set it is measured in minutes, which is measured in money.

Because flying and operating are different jobs, and only one of them is learnable in a weekend.

We have walked onto productions where the locations department said "I have a drone," and production seriously considered it. It goes the way you would expect. Pointing a camera at something is not the same as telling a story with it. Pace, framing, and the feel of a move are what put emotion in a frame, and those come from operating cameras for years, not from flying.

Our operators ask one question before every setup: what does this shot cut into? Whether the next scene is a funeral, a wedding, a flashback, or a fight changes the answer completely. The move gets built for where it lands in the edit, not for how it plays on its own.

Anyone can learn to fly in an hour. Learning to put feeling into a single frame takes years, and there is no shortcut through it.

Yes, and almost nobody offers it.

AGL owns a 2x2 Stratus array: four 150W emitters, roughly the output of a 10kW HMI, placed anywhere in the frame without a condor, a lift, or a street closure. On night exteriors that changes what a schedule can hold. On locations where conventional rigging is impractical, it changes what is possible at all.

Drone lighting

On the camera department's side of the line, taking direction from the DP the same as any other operator.

Frame language comes from the DP, not from what happens to look good in the air. Setups get rehearsed before they get flown. When the honest answer is that the shot wants a crane or a Steadicam, that is the answer we give, and we would rather give it in prep than on the day.

Crew based in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Florida, and Texas.

A local crew is a crew that is already familiar with the airspace before the tech scout, and one production is not flying in and housing. We work outside those four markets regularly.

Start with the boards and the schedule.

Tell us the shot and the day it lives on, and we will come back with the aircraft, the crew, the number of days, and anything in the plan that worries us. If the shot does not want a drone, we will tell you that before you have paid for one.