First-Person View Dronematography
The MIT Press eBooks · 2025
We brush swiftly in a low flight across the beach's sandy surface.Gravity is defied.In the blink of an eye, a graceful ascent narrowly misses the rapidly approaching lifeguard station.Santa Monica's dunes curve across the screen as we rise further, extending the airborne view to a soaring vertical angle high above the beach.Within seconds, soaring altitude transforms into a speedy descent.The scarlet sunrise swirls into the far-right corner of the frame.Stability is shaken, and wobbly scalar movement clings unevenly to the screen.Once more, the lifeguard station towers in front of us.This time, we slip through a small gap beneath it, quickly transiting between sand and wooden lattice.The beach bulges and swells with wavy parallax effects.Pliable warping sand and water morph with the radical distortion of the wide-angled field of sight.From these incessant bends and folds forms yet another soaring ascent.The spokes of the Ferris wheel at the beach fairground slice sand and sky into asymmetrical wedges as we pass in between them.Ground and planar surfaces disappear from stable spatial coordinates.Perspective is no longer vertical or horizontal, but disorienting, bending, and, stretching.A novel spatial discovery is made visible by way of elevation and unobstructed movement-oscillating vision in a fusion of close-up and mesmerizing overview.