Freedom Flight

Freedom Flight is a collaborative project with Celestial Labs Ltd, created for Amnesty International. It was a film created to raise awareness for Amnesty, featuring drone flights and drone footage shot by local film crews around the world. For this project interpreted a drawing of a dove created by Picasso for Amnesty, to create a version that could be flown in the sky. The visual technique was akin to making paper cut-outs, wings, body, tail which I then coded to animate. The wings flapped, the tail waggled, and I created a few different positions for the bird to be in, e.g. flying up or to the side. The final drone animation was approximately 60m wide and was flown in the Somerset base of Celestial Ltd, filmed and then superimposed into the location shots. We were still working under COVID restrictions.

Specific challenges of this project were to interpret the Picasso drawing in a way that would make it recognisable as well as flyable. I developed some new techniques for controlling the animation.