Get an inside look at the creative process we use at Freefly to develop new MōVI firmware.
Our Creative Process
One of the things I really love about working at Freefly is the diversity in skill set we have under one roof. You can find a huge range of expertise all the way from ultra-high-speed control loops to incredible cinematographers and finely-tuned user experience experts. Working with people that are truly pros at their craft keeps me hungry to learn and expand my own creative toolbox. It certainly can leave you feeling a bit inadequate at times, but one of the tenets we built Freefly on was to find people who were smarter and more capable than the founders and turn them loose. So far we have followed that idea and it’s allowed us to grow and develop a product line that is very diverse and complicated for a five-year-old, self-funded company. I am pretty excited to share our creative process and how we developed Akira over the course of a few years.
Feature Request / Ideas
These come from all over. They come from external customers posting ideas on our forum; they come from the internal filming team nicknamed ‘flight squad;’ and they also come from the engineers who are developing the embedded and software solutions that power the MōVI.
The best new features are usually a mixture of deep technical insight from the Engineering team and a keen understanding of user needs / experience from either internal or external sources.
Often times the conversation goes something like this:
Next, you can find these two detailing out the new hybrid idea on the whiteboard. Each has their own idea of the best implementation and there will often be some ‘enthusiastic’ discussion.
One thing we always try and keep in mind is solve for the customer.
It doesn’t matter what is easier for us, easier to code, easier to deliver, etc. It’s our job to put in the work to make the customer experience awesome. Sometimes this can be painful, but if we are to get to the destination that we care about (customer with a huge grin), it’s part of the process.
Whiteboard Sketches
InVision mock ups
Once we have some loose agreement from the whiteboard stage on how best to move to the next step, we will usually detail out the idea in InVision to allow the team to visualize the app / MōVI interaction. After this step, we will build a rough version of the app to push to the internal testing team.
MōVI Proto App
We have a build of the MōVI App called ‘MōVI Proto,’ which comes before our beta app that we push out to our external beta testers. This app is usually broken in some way, but serves to let us experiment in the field with the new feature and allows one of the most critical steps: Somebody on the team has to create a mind-blowing shot with the new feature.
This will galvanize the team to hustle and bring the product to market.
Timelapse Mode
We had been playing with this mode for a few years now in an early engineering version. The foundation was there, but the improvements made with HiPer really made the Timelapse Mode shine since it was able to stabilize the camera better, which becomes even more important for time and hyperlapses. Additionally, Deniz, Brent, John and Lorne substantially improved the ease of use and app experience. With these small tweaks, it went from a back-burner feature to center stage.
Target Mode
Target had been in testing for some time in various forms. It allows the user to set the MōVI to a mode where it will automatically point at the IMU on the MIMIC. This mode is truly incredible to watch when it is working properly, but it does heavily depend on the quality of the GPS signal in order to understand the relative positions of the MōVI and the MIMIC IMU that is being targeted. This is one of the reasons we use a high-performance, helical GPS antenna on our products.
Tips and Tricks
How I shoot MōVILapse
Here is how we shot the MōVILapses found in the Akira launch video:
MōVI Setup
- Set Remote Rate Scale to 1-5 deg/s. This will limit the maximum speed the MōVI can pan / tilt in Majestic Mode. You will have to experiment with the number based on the speed of your hyperlapse and how fast you want the moves to appear when played back faster. I ended up using around 4 deg/s for many shots.
- Set your Majestic window appropriately. I typically run with mine around 20 degrees to enable me to move around a bit as I walk without inadvertently giving the gimbal pan / tilt inputs.
- Increase your smoothing. For the shots in the Akira promo, I was usually shooting 1FPS. Theoretically, this means to create shots that look nice at 24FPS I need around 24x higher smoothing then I would normally use. I ended up running my smoothing around 50 for these shots. This, coupled with limiting the max rate the MōVI, can pan to ~4 deg/s resulted in some smooth hyperlapse shots.
Camera Setup
- I was obsessed with the A7s and A7Rii when we were shooting Akira, so I used those cameras for all the shots. Sometimes I used the Sony PlayMemories timelapse app to fire the shutter, and sometimes I used an inexpensive super cheapy intervalometer like this.
- For the night shots I sometimes wanted just a touch of motion blur, which meant slow shutter. I typically used somewhere around the following settings: ISO 64000, Shutter 1/50 sec, Aperture f/5.0.
How to Move
You need to train your brain to do everything 1/24 as fast as you normally would. Try to keep trajectories smooth and ease from one move to the next over a very long time scale. You need to plan for corners a city block in advance. Remember that you will only be able to have the MōVI change its angle at a max of 4 degrees per second! For a 90-degree turn that means it will take at least 22.5 seconds!
It takes some practice, but the good news is you will be getting plenty of cardio walking around your favorite places.
Camera Setup
- I was obsessed with the A7s and A7Rii when we were shooting Akira, so I used those cameras for all the shots. Sometimes I used the Sony PlayMemories timelapse app to fire the shutter, and sometimes I used an inexpensive super cheapy intervalometer like this.
- For the night shots I sometimes wanted just a touch of motion blur, which meant slow shutter. I typically used somewhere around the following settings: ISO 64000, Shutter 1/50 sec, Aperture f/5.0.
How to Move
You need to train your brain to do everything 1/24 as fast as you normally would. Try to keep trajectories smooth and ease from one move to the next over a very long time scale. You need to plan for corners a city block in advance. Remember that you will only be able to have the MōVI change its angle at a max of 4 degrees per second! For a 90-degree turn that means it will take at least 22.5 seconds!
It takes some practice, but the good news is you will be getting plenty of cardio walking around your favorite places.
Challenges
I was listening to an Adam Carolla podcast once where he cites that he is a joke factory and not a warehouse. I like to think of Freefly in the same way. We are trying to build the team, skills, and culture to constantly innovate and push the boundaries. We don’t want to just warehouse things we have done; we want to constantly tear old ideas up, and figure out what’s next. It’s this spirit that keeps us excited to come to work each day and endure the days when nothing seems to work as expected.
Thanks for giving Akira a try and all the incredibly useful feedback we have received.
Click here to get your hands on the stable release of Akira (MōVI FW 5.0).
Tabb Rants 
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