Spielberg's New Favorite Camera

our.movie.guide - Behind the scenes highlights with Steven Spielberg wearing Flying Monster hat!

We don't get excited to fly drones high in the sky. We get excited to capture a story in unique ways, sinking the audience deeper into their seat.

For decades, the camera has been tied down, bolted to dollies, swung from cranes, strung on wires, bound by the weight of the gear that carries it. Every one of those limits quietly decides which stories a filmmaker is allowed to tell. The shot they see in their head gets traded for the shot the equipment achieve in the time allocated to achieve.

Flying Monsters' exists to erase that trade-off. When you free the camera to go anywhere, to move the way a moment actually feel real, you hand the storyteller a freedom they've never had. That's the real reason we do this. To make the impossible shot possible, so the audience ends up inside the moment instead of watching it from the outside.

our.movie.guide - Behind the scenes highlights with Steven Spielberg and the cast, from the set of "Disclosure Day".

The way we honor that belief is by building and flying cinema cameras that move like nothing else on a set. On a single sequence, our camera can skim through the grass with inches of clearance, thread between the trees, weave among moving cars, and chase around a train.  All at a height and a speed no crane, dolly, or wire could ever hold. We don't just fly the skies. We fly inside the stage.

And it isn't only the camera. We also fly practical lights in the sky, coordinated sources that move with the action to shape a scene's realism from above. A light that can be anywhere, at any height, moving on cue, hands a cinematographer a tool that simply didn't exist a few years ago.

Every belief and every bit of craft we've built came together on the most thrilling set of our lives — Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day.

It's an original science-fiction event film created and directed by Spielberg, from a story by Spielberg and a screenplay by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds), scored by the legendary John Williams, and shot by two-time Academy Award–winning cinematographer Janusz Kamiński. It's produced by Kristie Macosko Krieger and Spielberg for Amblin Entertainment, released worldwide by Universal Pictures, and led by Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson and Colman Domingo. The premise lands like a held breath: if someone proved to you we aren't alone, would it frighten you?

THE COLLABORATION

Here's the part we'll never stop talking about. Once Spielberg saw the moves our platform could make, he reached for them. We put a camera on the biggest stunt in the picture — not near it, on it — and shots opened up that weren't possible with anything else. The collaboration ran both ways: on the day, the story bent toward the camera, beats shaped so a move could carry the moment rather than interrupt it, all to keep the audience locked into the film.



That's the dream for a crew that builds new tools — not just to execute a shot list, but to hand a great filmmaker a freedom they didn't have yesterday and watch what they do with it.

SPOTTED AT VIDEO VILLAGE

And the detail we still can't quite believe: in behind-the-scenes footage from the set, the director sits at the monitors, calling the shots, and wearing a Flying Monster Cinema Drones hat. For a small, independent aerial crew out of New Jersey, that's the kind of thing you frame on the wall.

OUR FRAMES FROM THE TRAILER