‘Animals’ Makes Drone Photography Look Forgettable, but It Doesn’t Need to Be

IndieWire spoke with a couple of shooters (positive) about the (negative) overuse of drone cinematography.

There’s a very fine art to doing cityscape b-roll and establishing shots. “Insecure” is great at it. “Hacks” is really good at it, too — in no small part because DP Adam Bricker and his longtime collaborator Charlie Panian perfected the art on “Chef’s Table.” The handoff to a drone for a haunting wide shot in “Adolescence” at the end of a 40-minute oner is kind of legendary.

Unfortunately, the more versatile the technology gets — the easier it is to achieve landscape-spanning vistas, awe-inspiring angles, and epic sweeps of scope — the easier it is for shots that should pack a punch to come across as flat and plastic as an empty takeout container run over by a bus. Even when Gillian Anderson is driving that bus, to belabor the metaphor, there’s only so much cinematography can do to involve viewers in a story if its visual style looks perilously close to a SmartTV screensaver.

It’s not necessarily the fault of director of photography Robert Elswit that the cinematography of “Animals,” which I’ve been alluding to, is so anonymous. As Stephen Sondheim teaches us, (forgettable) content dictates (forgettable) form. Given how many streamer films and true-crime docs are being quickly turned around online, though, it’s worth pausing to note that the returns on drone photography are worse right now than the price of diesel.

But a better world is possible. There are ways to use drone photography so that it counts. IndieWire spoke with DP Jeff Hutchens, who began his career as a photojournalist before transitioning to documentary and feature cinematography, about how his work avoids some of the worst clichés drones make so easy.

Sweeping a drone over a sun-drenched location is a big temptation, especially when a story beat needs a sense of scale or landscape. It’s fairly economical, logistically, to do. But for Hutchens and his team on Showtime’s “Murder in Big Horn,” embedding viewers in the story had to meld with emotional resonance that pushed the story just as far forward — and he found the right way to do that by leaning into on-the-ground limitations.

“The land on a lot of those reservations is so important, and the whole history of it plays such a huge role in how everything has unfolded to this day. You want to have some sense of the landscape. But that part of Montana is pretty flat, and it’s a little hard to get [height] and get perspective,” Hutchens told IndieWire. “What we decided to do was put the camera on a full, heavy-lift drone, take it up 400 feet, and use it as a tripod up there.”

By limiting what the drone photography would do — avoiding the easy, sometimes overly smooth movement that didn’t read as fast as it used to five years ago anyway — Hutchens found completely different, surprising, and resonant visuals that felt kin to the stories the show was documenting.

“With these static landscapes, we really looked at some of these dissonant shapes and lines and things that were cutting through the terrain out there,” Hutchens said. “You don’t want it to feel like, ‘OK, here comes another drone shot.’ It’s way overused. I think any time you can tweak a tool, at least, that is commonplace and work with it in a way that is a departure from what’s expected, I think that helps.”

However, cinematographers always need time and encouragement to get inventive with commonplace tools, especially in the documentary world where Hutchens does so much work. Almost all documentaries, he thinks, would prefer to be doing more verité footage, but it’s very hard to get networks to pay for the time and attention and mountain of footage that requires. “It’s really tricky to get commissioned work done that way,” Hutchens said.

But it’s all the more important, as fellow documentarian John Wilson makes clear in his latest feature, “The History of Concrete.” Wilson takes a swipe at drone photography in the film itself when he talks about receiving default-mode drone footage of a 3D-printed concrete Starbucks and the implications of it refusing to be subtext.

“There’s a sameness to the way that a lot of drone-heavy stuff looks and you can tell that it’s filler,” Wilson told IndieWire. “And I just find that’s not a great relationship to have with imagery. You’re using it almost, like, an artificially intelligent thing could make, you know? It doesn’t have this human element to it as much, and you are relying on this machine to get you this shot that is, ultimately, just screensaver material.”

Sometimes the mechanical, inhuman feeling of technological tools is an intentional choice — “Severance” DP and director Jessica Lee Gagné set that show’s template to give the camera inside Lumon HQ a smooth, mechanical, surveillance feel, for reasons the series makes clear. But drones can, when used at just the right moment and not overused, also carry deep, human emotions.

That’s exactly what cinematographer Matthew Lewis achieves at the end of the second episode of “Adolescence,” with a drone handoff that brings the camera from the school the police are investigating to the crime scene/memorial where the murder took place.  ”A real concern of mine was that the camera had its own personality and that it would start making decisions that didn’t feel connected to the motivations of our characters,” Lewis told IndieWire about the series.

But Lewis said justifying camera movements through human mannerisms and tics also made the drone the episode’s poignant exhale. “It’s impressive to do a sequence with loads of stunts if it’s an action scene,” Lewis said. “There’s this constant relief and release of, you know, there’s an explosion, that justifies why we’re still here. There’s a gunshot, so that explains why we’re still here. It’s in the downtime and in the pauses and in the restful moments, where you think you should rest, but you can’t, and you don’t know why — that’s what’s interesting.”

It’s also what is most human, and doing the human thing, rather than the easy thing, may be the healthiest thing going forward. “There is a lot of fear around what are [filmmakers] useful for in this landscape, you know? If we are creating this robotic imagery via stuff like drones, then it’s like we aren’t that different from the machines in certain ways,” Wilson said. “You should, I think, take a bit more care to have things feel like they were made by a human.”

Drones can be a part of that, but not by mindlessly speeding along the LA River like in “Animals.”