There’s nothing worse than road construction when you’re trying to get out to the gym or lunch and back before your 1:00 meeting. Meetings suck too now that I think of it. But let’s say there’s nothing we can do about either, and we’re stuck dealing with construction AND meetings. One thing you CAN do is understand what the construction is accomplishing, how things are improving and get a sense that the end is in sight.
That’s what Sierra Nevada Construction asked for when they contacted me to shoot aerial video of their project to drastically improve and modernize South Virginia Street in Reno, NV in the fall of 2019. It was pre pandemic when they asked me for some basic aerial imagery to document the before conditions of Virginia Street as they were starting the project. Somewhere along the way it morphed from technical documentation to a creative exercise where I shot dynamic aerial video and ground video and created short edits that they could post to social media to get the public excited about what was to come in MidTown.
Then for the next 12 months I was flying and shooting video from the ground of the progress on Virginia Street from Plumb Lane to California Ave and creating a catchy exciting video for Sierra Nevada Construction to post on their social channels.
They also asked for a similar service on Carson Street down in Carson City. So I added that to the project and did the same down there every month. SNC had great success with stakeholders being able to use the video updates to get the public behind two projects witch were pretty inconvenient at the time, but now that they’re finished are pretty amazing improvements to both cities.
It was a real challenge coming up with a new and interesting way to both shoot and edit these videos every month of the exact same thing. I developed graphics aligned to the respective brands of Reno and Carson City with a Cool modern font and lively indie music for Reno and a retro cowboy fond and peppy country music for Carson City. I pulled every fancy drone camera move out of my hat for these and eventually started using hyperlapse, which is when the drone travels slowly and takes a time lapse then synthesyzes the images into a high speed video.
To make the Street level video cooler I bought a OneWheel electric skateboard and shot video from a gimbal while riding on that. I even edited one of the Reno Videos in the tilt/shift style that makes the video look like a miniature. The client loved that one!
I also ended up taking a number of photos both ground and aerial for them to promote their progress and document this project.
Congrats to Reno and Carson for making such drastic improvements to two important roads! Sierra Nevada Construction did a spectacular job. You can see a full gallery of all of these aerial videos here.
-M