Texas Productions Aren’t All the Same Shoot
A producer scouting a Texas shoot is usually picturing one of two very different jobs: wide-open ranch land an hour outside a city, or a downtown core that’s grown fast enough to have new towers, new traffic patterns, and new airspace considerations since the last time a production shot there. CineDrones runs an Austin-based crew specifically because those two jobs require different planning, and we’d rather scope that difference with you during prep than discover it on location day.
Rural Locations Bring Their Own Airspace Considerations
Open land sounds like the easy version of a shoot, and in a lot of ways it is: fewer people, fewer structures, more flexibility on flight paths. But rural Texas locations often sit near small regional airports, agricultural airstrips, or military operating areas that don’t show up on a location scout’s radar the way a city’s restrictions do. Part of our prep work on a ranch or backcountry location is checking exactly that, well before the shoot date, so a producer isn’t told on arrival day that a flight plan needs to change because of an airstrip nobody flagged.
Downtown Austin Is a Different Job Than a Ranch an Hour Away
Flip that to a downtown location and the job changes completely. Dense blocks, pedestrian traffic, and construction cranes that weren’t there the last time a scout drove through mean the flight plan has to account for what the city looks like now, not what it looked like on a location library photo from a few years back. Being based in Austin rather than flying in for the job means we’re not planning from an outdated mental map. We know which blocks have gotten denser, where new structures have gone up, and what that does to a flight path before we ever submit paperwork.
Built to Work With Traveling Crews
A lot of the productions that call us for Texas work aren’t based in Texas themselves. That means our job includes fitting into a production’s existing paperwork and insurance structure rather than asking them to adapt to ours. CineDrones carries its own $5M aviation liability policy, works both Local 600 union and non-union crews, and operates under the same Part 107 compliance standards regardless of which of our markets you’re shooting in, so a producer moving between Los Angeles, Austin, and other cities on the same project gets the same standard of paperwork and the same point of contact throughout.
Get In Touch
If you’re scoping a Texas shoot, whether it’s a ranch location, a downtown block, or both on the same schedule, Get in touch with CineDrones and we’ll walk through the location specifics with you before you lock the schedule.
