Have a look at a truly impressive media project by Hobbes, WLS, and Firefly Drone Shows.
Hobbes, a design and animation studio from Detroit, has recently teamed up with VWLS and Firefly Drone Shows to create a music video for "High in Heaven," performed and shot by drones. The video shows a 300-foot-tall realistic face that lip syncs to the vocals using facial capture data to drive 200 drones. Here's the next level for the media industry.
The whole project started with a crazy idea: creating a larger than life human face in the sky. They started by designing the face. "Designing the 'drone face' was a key step for "High in Heaven.” As the sole focus of the video, it was crucial to hit the right balance of likeness and abstraction for the look we wanted," wrote the team. "The portrait is defined by confident line work, which lends itself to the drone format, and is reminiscent of stone carving features, contributing to its monolithic quality. Moves by Maxon made it easy to start with the very likeness of Josh and gradually shift into the “cosmic entity from space” look we were after, born from the stars and gazing out into the landscape."
Using Moves by Maxon, they recorded multiple performances from their studios in California and imported the data seamlessly into Cinema4D. They used pose morphs to blend between the performances, tuning based on the track. Then they used the result for all their drones.
You can learn more about the project and the team here.