Drone Footage

[Chuck Spaulding]

Produced this video to explain how we used drones to collect valuable data for industrial inspection and build 3D engineering models. We laso designed and manufacture our entire drones in the US.

Aerial Alchemy Services - YouTube

[Andrew Smith]

That's pretty dang good. The voice over delivery could be a bit more nuanced, but truly it's a great little video you have there.

Andrew

[Doug Jensen]

I agree, the music and robotic computer-generated narration is hard to listen to. Especially when the script sounds like the text was just copied and pasted from the company's annual report. The visuals are great, though.

[Chuck Spaulding]

That's actually a real human voice - Speedy Spots. They're quick, relatively inexpensive and easy to work with. They would have gladly made changes if I wanted to punch it up a bit but I thought it got the point across pretty well.

One of my staff went out and got the music, I would have liked something more dramatic for the opening and added different music for the narrative. But she was pretty happy with her choice and I didn't want to take the wind out of her sails on her first project.

Regarding the visuals, shortly after we completed this video the utility customer wanted us to scan the electric grid in Yosemite Valley (during the winter). There was hardly anyone in Yosemite and we were the only company allowed to fly in the valley. We came away with some amazing photographs and footage but you run the risk of damaging your relationship with the customer if we used it for anything other than its intended use. I just recently shut down Aerial Alchemy -- huh?

Still not sure its worth picking a fight with one of my best customers...

[Chuck Spaulding]

Originally Posted by Andrew Smith

That's pretty dang good. The voice over delivery could be a bit more nuanced, but truly it's a great little video you have there.

Andrew

Thanks for the compliment. How are things in Australia. I'm Australian, (Geelong) living in California and getting homesick. When I first moved here it was the land of opportunity that provided me with a great career but over the past four years California has fallen off a cliff so now I'm considering moving.

[Andrew Smith]

Best to move to another state in the USA rather than come back here.

House prices here are up the wazoo because the government is flooding the place with insane levels of immigration, arguably to use the wealth influx to stave off a recession. But the result is that we simply don't have the housing stock for them all, so purchase and rent pricing has gone through the roof and we now have 'working homeless' and others in various unofficial camp sites around the place such as public parks. These are people who are homeless simply because there isn't enough housing.

And the federal government isn't slowing down the intake at all.

Meanwhile a whole bunch of decisions on the basis of 'green energy' has meant that the cost of electricity (and other energy forms) has kept on increasing such that it's now a major component of the running of a business or household. Some of our food manufacturers here will take the Australian ingredients, ship it over to New Zealand (from memory) for the energy intensive part, and then ship the finished product back here for sale.

On top of this you have an industrial scale rollout of (intermittent generation) solar power facilities on otherwise prime agricultural land. The combined area for this is bigger than the land mass of Tasmania, and it's all being done somewhat secretively due to a lame media we have.

Speaking of lameness of media, Channel 7 and Network 10 have been doing staff cutbacks due to declining ratings as a result of declining viewers. It's very possible that they're having to do this because their own audience have wised up during the covid years and have had to start looking elsewhere for news.

These days we have this surreal thing happening where the news publishers will do a Facebook post on something and - almost to a man - there is a flood of commenters correcting what the newspaper is saying. It's vastly different to pre-covid. It's as if there has been a great awakening among the people.

Speaking of covid, I was in Melbourne's CBD last October and there are still great swathes of vacant prime retail space. Victoria had the worst lockdowns and now the state is unofficially broke. They're desperate to get money in and so things like land tax have absolutely skyrocketed. People are literally stunned at the increase in their latest land tax bill versus a year ago. The harder and longer the lockdowns, the greater the level of absolute devastation.

The smart ones are leaving. Even during the latter of the lockdown years a realtor in Brisbane told me that 60% of the house sales were to people fleeing from Melbourne and Sydney.

But the bottom line is that when you lock down society you also lock down the economy. It's like the place still hasn't recovered from the damage done - you just get used to it as a new kind of normal.

On the bright side, we said an overwhelming "no" to the Voice proposal which was never actually detailed and in practice would have added an extra layer on top of the government which could tell the other layers what to do. The short story here is that we essentially dodged being changed to a socialism/communism governance structure that would have been literally impossible to get rid of. It started with a 70% support rate in the polling and by the time it had all finished it was almost completely inverted, which resulted in an overwhelming nation-wide defeat. Despite this the people behind it are regrouping and trying to use other means.

There's more, but that's a quick update. A pessimist would start thinking they're running the place into the ground on purpose for some reason.

Andrew

[Rudy Wilms]

Very nice video interesting too, Iam sure those Yosemite drone footage were nice to see such a great national park sad that drones are not allowed but is understandable since it gets that many visitors.Tempting not to use the footage from client haha but you at least have it for your own enjoyment.