The Viral Smokescreen
On August 3rd, Fort McMurray Alberta was engulfed in a thick haze of smoke from surrounding wildfires. A lot of it was being blown in from the massive fires happening in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, however there were some smaller ones in Alberta as well that were making their way over our skies. I had looked out the window of my apartment to see nothing but thick brown smoke, you could barely see across the street. I had wanted to get a good shot of some of the smokier days here before, but always got too caught up in something else or forgotten completely. That day however I went out and tossed my DJI Mini 3 drone up and took a few shots of how intensely smokey it was. I came inside, took a few minutes to edit the video together and threw some epic stock music over top. I posted this video to Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and my Youtube.
My recreation of the opening shot from Blade Runner.
Opening shot from Blade Runner
This isn’t the first time I looked at the amount of smoke outside, it reminded me of one of my favourite movies of all time Blade Runner. So I wanted that first opening text to match. I found that the font they used in the original movie is available in Adobe Fonts, it was called LTC Goudy Oldstyle Pro, I closed in the kerning a bit from its default and I had exactly what I wanted. The video only consisted of 4 different shots, which was all I could get before the high winds and rain started to really affect the flight of the drone and I decided to land. In the last shot of the video you can actually watch in real-time as the wind rolls in and blows the smoke away.
I had no idea how much the video would blow up on Facebook, as of writing this post, it is sitting at over a thousand likes, shares and over 200 comments. People had asked if I added some kind of filter onto the video or doctored it in any way and honestly that is about as raw as that footage can be. No filters or AI or anything added at all, just the insane looking sky at around 7pm in the evening. This video even got picked up by The Weather Network and MétéoMédia which is the Weather Network in Quebec (with my permission of course) along with some local news within Fort McMurray.
I always find it funny that it’s always the videos you least expect to go viral that often do. This was by far my best performing video of all time, but it was in way low effort so it just feels weirdly like cheating. I think if there is a lesson here to learn from the experience, it’s to take the opportunities presented to you to create something cool. It was hazy as heck, I was tired, i didn’t feel like going outside at all, let alone flying my drone, but my partner encouraged me to do it and so I did. It paid off and I will be actively embracing opportunities like this in the future.
My weirdly specific fortune from our Chinese food the next day.
