Dronely Kubrick

Inspiration

Coming into the Hackathon, as shocking as it may seem, 2 of our 3 team members had never written a real line of code in my entire life. I, along with my friend Rob, were persuaded into taking part in the Hackathon by our roommate and good friend Omri, who happens to be a CS major, without much of a real understanding of what we were getting ourselves into. While sitting at the opening ceremonies, feeling like we wer left out of some inside joke that everybody else in the room was a part of, we became determined to quickly come up with an idea that, with Omri's knowledge and help, we could somehow manifest in 36 hours, and that our prior knowledge would serve to help us succesfully build.

Being a Creative Writing major who's taken several film courses, and knowing that we would have access to drones with cameras on them, I came up with an idea that I thought might be worth trying to pull off. Having learned a bit about cinematography in those classes, and having actually tried to film some shorts myself at one point in time, I was well aware that to make a truly professional looking video, one needs access either to a Director of Photography (which costs a lot of money), or to a ton of extremely nice equipment (which costs even more money, and also requires some serious, serious skill). Enter Dronely (pronounced Drone-lee) Kubrick. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick, arguably the most visionary director of all time, we aimed to create a UI that leverages the programmable capabilities of an HD filming drone, strung together by some lines of code, to deliver nearly any filmmaker, with nearly any budget, access to expert camera angles and shots at the touch of a few buttons.

What it does

Built using HTML5 and CSS, the user interface for DK is a clean platform on which filmmakers can select one of four of the most frequently-used shots in film. The filmmaker simply has to connect to the drone's wifi network, and click on the preferred shot, and voila! Being built in 36 hours by a group that had 2 members who had to utilize over half of the time to simply learn the basic building blocks of coding and programming, the interface naturally does not accomplish everything that we one day envision it doing. It is, however, a very promising start to what we feel represents a big step forward in filmmaking.

How I built it

I personally built the site on HTML5 and CSS using the bootstrap Jumbotron template, while my teammates tackled the problems of getting the drone's live stream to connect to a server that we could host the site on, and programming the drone to be able to shoot the director's selected shots in an automated fashion (and then program that code into buttons on our UI). In the end, we created a user-friendly, aesthetically appealing interface with scaled functionality that we feel is a highly promising proof of concept for DK.

Challenges I ran into

Aside from not really knowing how to do anything necessary to complete the project at the start of the weekend, the idea itself had some pretty major roadblocks, that (per my roommate, and some of the hackathon's mentors) would've been challenging for even the most talented of hackers. Namely, getting the drone to broadcast live on the same server as our website, programming the website's button's to command the drone, and getting the UI to run on the drone's wifi gave our team some big headaches. A lot was overcome through trial by fire, and a lot of stack overflow.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Honestly, I think that we put together a really great first effort at what we all believe could be truly disruptive and revolutionary idea. I am most proud of the way we managed to each truly contribute a piece to the project that itlegitimately would not have been nearly as complete without.

What I learned

HOW TO CODE. Kind of. I was reminded more than enough times through the weekend that HTML and CSS aren't 'real coding.' In any case, whatever they are, I learned a lot of it.

What's next for Dronely Kubrick

We hope to continue to develop the interface until we reach a level that we are 100% satisfied with, so that we can eventually get some filmmakers on the scene to try out the product. From there, our hope is to continue to add functionality, whether that be in the form of more shots, better quality, longer duration, or multiple drones filming at once being controlled on the same interface. Seeing how much we accomplished with the odds stacked against us this weekend has absolutely given us the affirmation that we need to make sure we keep this project going, and see it out until the final cut to black.