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This flying 1,000 watt spotlight drone creates eerie, beautiful footage

This flying 1,000 watt spotlight drone creates eerie, beautiful footage

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God bless YouTubers and their insatiable desire for messing around with electronics and drones. The latest fruits of their collective labor comes from YouTube channel rctestflight, which managed to strap a 1,000 watt LED light bar to the underside of a Freefly Alta octocopter.

The resulting device is basically a flying spotlight, capable of flooding any area with a bright, white light. In the first two minutes of the video above rctestlight explains the set up, but it's the rest of it that's really worth watching, showing off the various shots the drone can produce. I think my favorite is the one at around 2:20, illuminating a metal-framed bridge:

But as serene and eerie as this footage seems, it's worth remembering that this is a pretty heavy-duty drone, meaning it's very noisy. The behind-the-scenes video gives a more honest impression of what it's actually like to use the craft, which apparently involves a lot of shouting ("Higher! Higher!") and a buzzing sound like that of a million extremely angry bees. Worth it for those shots though.