Drone filming on a cruise ship isn’t something that I’ve experienced before so when I was recently asked to spend twenty days aboard Silversea’s new cruise ship, the Silver Moon for her maiden voyage in the Greek Isles I jumped at the chance! Working as part of a small three person film crew my duties were to capture stills and footage of the ship and our locations as well as work as on-board editor producing a series of films which will be released by Silversea in the future.
Drone filming on a cruise ship is extremely challenging, it’s unlike anything I’ve filmed with the drone before. The ship can be travelling at up to 15 knots and depending on the wind direction that can easily be doubled once wind is taken in to account so each flight requires very careful measurements and planning to make sure that we could recover the drone. We opted to use the DJI Phantom 4 Pro for this as it can be easily captured by hand rather than trying to land it on a fairly small part of the deck on a moving ship.
There are many techniques, flight settings and considerations that go in to safely drone filming on a cruise ship, you cannot rely on GPS at all given the constant movement of the ship so the drone must be flown in a manual mode the whole time otherwise things will go wrong very quickly indeed. I’m pleased to say that even though I flew the drone most days and the learning curve was pretty steep both me and the Phantom survived the voyage and we’re ready for our next adventure at sea!
