For the social campaign ahead of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, QYou Media for Paramount hired Drone Tech Aerial to solve an unusual brief: make a basketball hoop fly, and make it flyable enough that Lethal Shooter (Chris Matthews, NBA shooting coach) could sink shots on it mid-air. The campaign was built as a creator-led narrative, and the storyline started with our sequence: a hacker steals a drone along with Lethal Shooter’s prized basketball, and the recovery mission plays out in Mission: Impossible style across a roster of creators.
We fabricated the rig in our shop and flew it under our Freefly Alta 8.
The Build
A rigid connection between hoop and airframe would have been the obvious approach, and the wrong one. Every ball strike would transfer force into the aircraft, and the mass swinging below would act like a pendulum. Instead we suspended the hoop on shock-absorbing bungee with the basket free-floating: ball impacts and gusts move the hoop, not the drone. The aircraft stayed stable and controllable through every take, including in wind.
Before anyone saw a set, we spent over a day fabricating and testing: shooting baskets on the rig, breakaway-testing the ball, and load-testing with added weight for the final beat, where the ball sticks in the net and the drone flies away with it. The client signed off on test footage before the shoot day. We showed up with zero unknowns.
The Flying
Trick shots on a moving target only work if the target is where the shooter expects it. The piloting job was repeatability: the same path, the same speed, take after take, so Lethal Shooter could commit the shot to muscle memory. He made shots on the hoop in flight on repeated takes, and the final capture-and-fly-away was executed as designed.
With the hoop hanging below the airframe, a ground takeoff was off the table, so every flight started from a hand launch. We equipped our launch operator with a helmet as an added precaution. It was never needed. That is the point of the precaution.
The campaign ran ahead of the film’s theatrical release. See the reel on Instagram.
The Campaign
QYou Media’s published case study reports the creator campaign ran across 9 global markets and generated 36.4 million video views and 3.2 million engagements against a 112 million subscriber reach, supporting the film’s franchise-best $127 million opening weekend. The stolen-basketball storyline our sequence launched was the narrative spine of the campaign.
Fabrication Is Part of the Service
Most aerial briefs are camera work. Some need hardware that does not exist yet. With a mechanical engineering background and an in-house shop, we design, build, load-test, and fly custom payloads as one workflow, and deliver proof of concept before the shoot day.
For custom aerial rigging or cinema drone work in Los Angeles, request a quote or see our aerial cinematography for commercials.