MPAA Wants To Use Drones In Filmmaking

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

Drones

If Big Brother will always be the future threat of demolished privacy, then his infancy lies in the proliferation of drones in the skies. I’d love to put on my tin foil hat and scream at you guys through a modified dunce cap atop a literal soapbox, but I’m much more inclined to just begrudgingly accept things like this rather than be loudly outspoken against them anywhere outside of Facebook. I have stories to write, after all. But what if the drones were used to make entertainment? Does that make their potential for danger any less prevalent? Hell no it doesn’t, but it sure will be pretty.

Members of the Motion Picture Associate of America (MPAA) are lobbying the FAA and the Obama administration to allow film crews to use unmanned drones in filming aerial shots, which would be a cheaper, safer, and more useful alternative to using heavy machinery such as cranes and helicopters.

“You can innovate in a number of different, interesting ways to shoot a scene,” explained MPAA spokesman Howard Gantman. To assure any issues of safety, he says, “This is line-of-sight, on the set, used to take shots from above, beside different scenes.” Which is a fragmented way of saying the drone cameras would stay on the set lot, and would be used only in attaining said shots, and for no other personal purposes.

It’s only a matter of time before this happens, even if the film industry doesn’t get to be the spearheader. Drones are currently illegal for business to use, though police departments have recently been giving the technology some serious thought. Around 30,000 drones, both private and government-based, are expected to be in our nation’s skies by the end of the decade. Will most of them belong to tabloids and news corporations? We shall see, from a vantage point in the sky.

Subscribe for Science News
Get More Real But Weird

Science News

Expect a confirmation email if you Subscribe.