In December 2020 I was commissioned by German Agency Fotogloria and their clients Osram and Traxon Technologies to capture stills, time-lapse and video featuring their lighting on the facade of the Landmark 81 building in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
My brief was to create a 2 minute film and capture 15 images during a 3 hour period where the building would be illuminated as it is most evenings from 5pm to 6:30pm and at 6:30pm they planned to switch the effect to display the Vietnamese flag until 8pm when the lights would be turned off. Osram wanted 80% of the imagery to be captured from the air and the remainder of the shots to be taken from ground level including time-lapse and both tight and wide shots of the building.
I shoot most of my aerial work with a DJI Mavic Pro II but as we would be shooting at night I decided to work with a local drone team and shoot the aerials with the DJI Inspire 2 and the Zenmuse X7 camera which produces much cleaner images in low light.
The next step was to work out the best location to shoot from so a few weeks before the shoot I stopped past the building and visited various vantage points from both sides of the river and below are some of the options that I came up with.
It was clear that the best location was from over the river and I ended up choosing to shoot from an angle where I could capture two faces of the building and also where I would see the city centre in the background. This position was also advantageous as it was far away from the powerlines running alongside the bridge which could cause reception issues with the drone. It was a quiet spot with minimal traffic making it ideal for capturing the time-lapse and also an ideal location to take off and land the drone. The bridge offered an interesting angle from the side of the building and the park would have been an ideal location for take off and landing and also offered a range of interesting vantage points but I felt that within 3 hour time frame that I would lose too much shooting time traveling between locations so I decided to shoot everything from the one location.
Having chosen the location I decided to head out to the building a few days before the shoot and to do some time-lapse tests so as to work out the best settings to use and also which camera to shoot my time-lapse with. I tested intervals of 1 second, 3 seconds and 5 seconds with both my Sony A7RIII and my old Canon 5D MK II connected to my CamRangers. I found that for time-lapse that I got the best results with my 5D MK II as I found the intervals with the Sony were inconsistent due to slower downloading times to the CamRanger. I ended up choosing an interval of 3 seconds as I felt that this interval length produced the most pleasing result.
The final thing to worry about was the weather. The shoot was scheduled for late December which was well into the dry season but in the days leading up to the shoot there was some uncharacteristic storms passing through the city and rain was forecast for the evening of the shoot. The shooting date though had been organised ahead of time with building management and it seemed like it would be difficult to reschedule so after discussing with Ryan from Osram we decided to go ahead and hope for the best.
We were lucky though and on the day of the shoot I arrived at the location with the building bathed in beautiful sunshine. I arrived 2 hours before sunset and set up 2 cameras for time-lapse, 1 camera for stills and 1 camera for video and below is my setup.
Once I was setup I asked the drone team to do a quick test flight so that we could work out some angles to shoot from in the air prior to dusk.
Just after 5pm the lights started to come on and I started my time-lapses. I had one wide time-lapse using a Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II Tilt-Shift Lens for perspective control and I had a second time-lapse camera with a Sony FE 85mm f/1.4 lens which I had aimed at the area of the building where at 6:30pm the lighting effect would change to show the Vietnamese flag. Unfortunately the focus slipped during the 85mm time lapse so I didn’t use it in the end but I was very happy with the wider timelapse.
I had 5 batteries for the drone which lasted 15 minutes each so my plan was to do two flights during blue hour before the flag effect. I then planned to launch a drone just before 6:30pm to capture the lighting effect change and then I would do two more flights before the effect was turned off at 8pm. I planned to use the time in between the drone flights to check in on my times-lapses and take stills and video footage from the ground.
For the most part everything went really well and the colours in the sky at sunset were spectacular but shortly after dark we had a little bit of rain and we had to ground the drone. It didn’t last long though and we were getting ready to take off just before 6:30pm when all of a sudden the lighting effect was turned on 10 minutes early so I wasn’t able to get a shot of the flag coming on from the air.
I am very happy with the end result and so was both the agency and the client. Below are some of the best shots from that evening and also the video that I delivered.
A behind the scenes look into an interior and exterior architectural project that I shot for New World Hoiana Beach Resort in Hoi An, Vietnam in early 2023. In this post I explain how I approach replacing skies when the weather doesn’t play along during a shoot.