I am not exactly a morning person, and normally the prospect of having to get up at 6am on a Sunday morning and do some filming at the Hobart waterfront would be the last thing on my mind. However, on this occassion I had the rare opportunity to film a man playing piano in a cage suspended above the Hobart waterfront.
We had permission to use the drone from TasPorts and the weather was fine, though a sudden gust of wind blew up as I got there. But this was one of several logistical problems that I discovered fairly last minute, and in hindsight a bit more pre-planning would have helped.
The first thing I didn't realise was that there was a major fun run going on around the site where the piano was to be winched up, so the area to manoeuvre the drone was rather restricted. On top of this, as you may see from the photo, there were some objects nearby that also restricted some angles.
As it happens, it was actually quite beneficial to keep the drone quite close to the cage, though it was sometimes hard to anticipated where the crane operator was going to swing it and at what speed ! This didn't seem to disconcert Kelvin though as he continued playing without pause as the piano ascended rapidly in the air seemingly plummeted back down or rotated above the runners on the road below.
It also got quite busy as the morning wore on with runners seemingly taking shortcuts rather too close to our "enclosure". But having all the activity around kind of added to the video and I tried to get as much of this context as I could. After all, it's quite a sight to see a man playing a piano in a cage hanging high above runners variously jogging, walking or sprinting past Hobart's scenic waterfront area.
Despite some technical challenges and me mucking up quite a few things, we got some nice vision of the piano above Princes Wharf No 1 as the sun was just peaking its face over the horizon and kissed the cage with its golden light.