We should have known that if Tesla was going to make a Behind the Scenes video of its new Gigaplant factory it wasn’t going to be just any old video. What they made was, of course, pretty epic. It’s a fly-through drone video shot from First Person View (FPV), and it must have been incredible to watch them filming it.
The new Tesla plant is based in Berlin, Germany and the video was released the same day the company announced their first-quarter production numbers for 2022. According to Tesla, the factory is the most advanced, sustainable, and efficient ever.
The video begins outside the factory and quickly takes us on a sweeping tour of the inside of the facility. Expertly timed, we appear to fly through the machines while they produce parts of the cars, with almost video-game-like closeness to getting crushed ourselves in the process.
As to be expected with this type of fly-through video there are some tight spaces that the drone navigates through, such as car windows and letterbox size spaces. Sparks fly as we careen through the assembly line of new Tesla cars while they are worked on simultaneously by multiple robotic arms. We see cars dipped and sprayed, cars without wheels, cars having the interior built. Finally, we finish with the completed cars, lined up and shiny with a backwards zoom out where we catch two of the workers high-fiving each other. It’s a nice detail at the end of a well-made video.
The most startling aspect, however, is how few real live humans there are working there. The plant is absolutely huge, and the majority of the manufacturing is done with robotics. It’s no great surprise given that most car manufacturers work this way, but it really is quite impressive and you get a great feel for the scale.
Perhaps for this reason of the sheer scale of the plant, the video is not made in just one take like so many other similar FPV videos. There are cuts visible, however, they are cleverly and seamlessly edited so that the feel is still very much the same as a one-take FPV drone fly-through. For me, it doesn’t detract at all from the final video.
First-person view fly-through videos have become increasingly popular in recent years, from the capture of the bowling alley to a fly-through of Mall of America in Minneapolis, from wedding venues to dental surgeries. To be able to execute such videos requires careful planning, intricate piloting skills, patience, and of course a lot of practice. Still, the effort is worth it and I can predict that we will see a lot more of this style of video before they become passe.
FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!