In 2018, we were brought onto the YSL Libre fragrance campaign featuring Dua Lipa, produced by Reset Content. The shoot ran across multiple days and three locations: Sycamore Beach in Malibu, a mountaintop in Santa Clarita, and a section of the Grand Canyon. The aerial unit was Drone Tech Aerial. The aircraft was our Freefly Alta 8. The camera was an ARRI Alexa Mini with a set of vintage Panavision prime lenses.
The footage has been running in advertising placements ever since. I saw it on a screen at LAX in 2025. That is seven years of a single aerial shoot still performing in market, still on screens, still representing the brand. That is what cinema-grade aerial looks like over time versus footage that dates itself inside a season.
The aerial unit ended up carrying roughly a third of the minute-long final spot. That is not a number we asked for. It is a number that happened because the footage cut.
What Was Actually on the Aircraft
When a production calls for an aerial camera that matches what the rest of the team is shooting on the ground, the Freefly Alta 8 with an ARRI Alexa Mini is the configuration that answers that brief. The Alexa’s sensor latitude, color science, and organic film-like rendering are why directors of photography choose it for premium commercial work. Putting that sensor in the air means the aerial material integrates with the ground footage without a color science conversation in post.
The Panavision lenses on this shoot were vintage glass, optically distinctive, with character that modern lenses are engineered to remove. The look they produce is specific and recognizable, and it was the right choice for a luxury fragrance campaign that needed visual texture and warmth rather than clinical sharpness.
Getting vintage Panavision lenses to work on an aerial rig requires more than a mount adapter. We integrated the Alexa Mini through a Movi Pro gimbal system, which gave us full remote camera control from the ground: live HD feed, iris control, focus, and zoom, all through the Movi Pro’s wireless system and hidden lens motors built into the lens assembly. The camera operator on the ground could see exactly what the camera was seeing and make lens adjustments in real time. For a shoot at this level, that control capability is not optional. It is what allows the DP and director to work confidently with aerial.
Before the shoot, we spent pre-production time at Panavision going through every piece of the system: the camera body, every lens in the box, every focus motor. High-stakes commercial work with premium talent and a luxury brand client does not have a second chance to get the technical configuration right. We confirmed every component before we ever got to a location.
Three Locations, Three Sets of Problems to Solve
Sycamore Beach, Malibu
The Sycamore Beach sequence was our home terrain. We know this airspace. We know the coastal conditions. Filming Dua Lipa with the Alta 8 and Alexa Mini, we were getting the kind of fluid, high-latitude aerial coverage that the ground unit could cut against seamlessly.
The setup put the talent out in the surf while we operated from the beach. A traditional camera rig cannot follow that geometry. The drone can. We pulled longer focal length than we would normally fly with at that distance, which gave us the safety standoff we wanted from the talent and let the wave action read in frame at the same time.
The Alta 8 with a fully built cinema package on board does not handle like a smaller aircraft. It is closer to driving an elephant than a sports car. Compared to a DJI Inspire 3, the Alta 8 is slower to react, less nimble, and asks more of the pilot in the small corrections. That is the trade you make to fly a sensor and a glass package at this level. The flight plan adapts. We were running slow establishing moves and flybys, which is what the platform does well, and we let the rest of the day’s coverage match that pace.
At one point during the beach sequence, a wave came in harder than anticipated and got to Dua Lipa before we could anticipate it. She went down. The shot was over for that setup. Some moments on a commercial shoot are beyond the aerial unit’s control. This was one of them. The footage we got before that moment was what it needed to be, and the shoot moved on.
Santa Clarita Mountaintop
The Santa Clarita location gave us the elevated terrain and the atmospheric quality the production was building toward. The hero shot from this location was at sunset: the Libre sign, a large branded installation with propane gas running through it, producing open moving flame, lit against the fading sky. The fire moved. The light it cast was warm and alive. The Alta 8 came in around that sign and the Alexa captured something that no ground camera position could have produced.
Cinematographer Darius Khondji, whose credits include the film Se7en, was directing the visual approach on this campaign. Working with a DP at that level means the aerial unit has to operate at the same standard of preparation and craft that the rest of the production is holding. There is no room for “we’ll figure it out on the day.”
The Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon portion of the shoot introduced two variables that work against a fully loaded cinema drone: altitude and temperature.
At Grand Canyon elevation, the air is thinner. Rotor efficiency decreases. An Alta 8 carrying an Alexa Mini, a Movi Pro, vintage Panavision glass, and all the associated hardware is a significant payload, and that payload at altitude demands more from the aircraft than the same configuration would at sea level. We also had freezing temperatures on location, which affected the vintage lens focus motors. They got sticky in the cold, which is exactly the kind of failure mode that ends a shoot day if you have not prepared for it.
We prepared for it. Before the Grand Canyon day, we had already identified the weight budget we needed to hit to fly safely at that elevation. We swapped to lighter batteries. We stripped accessories that were not essential to the shot. We got the aircraft to a weight where it could perform reliably in the conditions we were going to encounter, rather than hoping it would clear performance margins that we could see were going to be tight.
The lens motor situation we managed through the day, working with the primes we had, staying ahead of the temperature’s effect on the mechanisms, and getting through the shot list without losing a lens. Every prime in the box got used. Nothing got left behind because the conditions beat us.
The shot list at the canyon also included Dua Lipa standing untethered at the cliff edge while the Alta 8 flew above her, below her, and around her. That is a configuration where the aerial unit is responsible for the talent’s safety in a way that the ground unit cannot share. Every move was rehearsed. Every approach line was committed before we got near her. The footage that came out of that setup is among the most striking in the campaign because the aerial position is doing something a ground rig physically cannot do.
We shot a live eagle in the canyon airspace as part of the same trip. Some of the eagle work in the final spot is from those live captures. Other shots in the spot were built from clean aerial plates we delivered, with a bird composited in by the post team. Either approach asks the same thing of the aerial unit: deliver footage clean enough that the VFX pipeline can build on it, with the camera package the rest of the production is matching to.
What This Shoot Cost Versus What Competitors Quoted
When the production was getting quotes for the aerial component of this campaign, other operators in the market were pricing for a DJI Inspire 2. The Inspire 2 is a professional-grade drone. For a lot of productions, it is the right tool. It was not the right tool for a multi-day luxury fragrance campaign designed to run in international advertising placements for years.
We brought the Alta 8 with an ARRI Alexa Mini, cinema camera, vintage glass, full remote lens control, complete gimbal integration, at the same day rate the other operators were quoting for an Inspire 2. The production got broadcast-quality aerial that has been in market since 2018. The rate was what it was. The footage is still running.
That is what camera-matched aerial means in practice.
Reset Content
This campaign was produced by Reset Content. We have worked with Reset Content on multiple productions since. The pattern with every client we work with: once the production runs cleanly, once the footage delivers, once the pre-production overhead we absorbed frees up their coordinator to focus on other things. They come back. The relationship with Reset Content is one of the longer-standing ones, and it started on a beach in Malibu when a wave took out the talent and the shoot kept moving.
If your production has a brief that requires aerial to match a specific camera package or work with specialty glass, book a consultation to discuss the configuration.
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