A Different Perspective of Portsmouth

In March 2020, we decided to break the gloomy news cycle. Social feeds and TV screens were dominated by stressful headlines and exhausting statistics. Aside from the love shown for key workers, few human stories shone through the facts and figures. So we started planning 'A Different Perspective of Portsmouth' — a documentary that would capture the global pandemic through the lens of local voices.

A Different Perspective helped us decentralise our cash flow away from total reliance on commercial drone work. Like everyone else, we were in completely uncharted waters, and had no idea how lockdown would affect the drone industry.

The absence of crowds would make it possible to fly in places we wouldn't usually be able to, but would that same lack of custom prevent businesses from spending on aerial photography or surveys? This was a risk we needed to negate.

Plus, with half our team furloughed, we were limited in some of the jobs we could take on anyway — particularly projects that called for a minimum of three people (a pilot, a spotter, and a cinematographer).

We started a crowdfunding campaign, for four key reasons: sustaining our small family business through uncertain times; documenting our hometown and its people during an historic event; gifting contributors beautiful aerial photos of the places they most missed while under lockdown; and making the project fully scalable, so our ambition and work could grow in tandem with the success of the crowdfunding campaign.

£5,000 in donations later, the campaign had proven to be a huge success! That's how the project evolved from a short film into a feature-length documentary!