The City and the Wild – behind the scenes!

“Why choose between city and nature when you can have both in one place?!” – the words written by the team at Innsbruck Tourism explain exactly where Innsbruck city is located, and the goal of this project was to show just that through one short video:

The city of Innsbruck is surrounded by easily accessible wilderness and nature, and the idea of this video was to present this uniqueness.

Chris and Matt from the Online Team at Innsbruck Tourism sent me a brief at the start of July and requested the video to be completed as soon as possible.

I jumped at the challenge and was pleased that within a week, even with some bad weather getting in the way, I created the screenplay and filming plan, filmed the additional scenes (together with FPV drone pilot Paul Kuhn), produced the music, cut and coloured the video, then delivered the first draft.

Following the review stage, all that was needed was some minor adjustments and the sound design to be added.

Matt and Chris had the idea of capturing a time-lapse from a window ledge at their office, which looks down one of the most popular streets in Innsbruck – the Maria-Theresien-Straße:

I ran the time-lapse overnight which captured the moon hovering above the street and distant Serles and Nockspitze mountains. This led me to begin the story with a close up of the moon that I had recorded previously. With a snazzy transition inserted, it linked up well.

I thought a lot about the kind of music I wanted to produce for this video. I first thought about something “wild” with a high BPM, maybe in the style of House or Drum and Bass.

But what will this video represent? Yes, there are many high intensity activities to choose from here in summer, but this “City and Wild” shows that it is also easy going, chilled and relaxed, especially when you’re in the wilderness and experience the beautiful nature around you.

I downloaded some low BPM, royalty free samples with a summer/beach vibe and imported them into Logic Pro X. I played around with them and added additional musical tracks such as the bassline. All sound fx you hear were added in the video editing software at the end.

 It was a pleasure to have Paul Kuhn on another project with me again. He’s been in the race drone game for many years now and I’m always blown away by his work. The last video we worked on together was for an Epic Innsbruck episode at Bergisel.

Going with the theme City and Wild, I wanted to add some wild shots to contrast with the chilled music and of course Paul delivered! We went to Zirl first because Matt and Chris wanted some epic shots from the FPV drone flying through the Ehnbachklamm gorge. We split it into sections and Paul worked his magic.

When we reached the top, we saw a hole in the dam and thought it could look really special if the drone flew through it, but would it fit? Find out at the end of the video!

We were lucky to catch some climbers on the rock face who were more than happy to be a part of the video, cheers Sergio Brell, Carlos Regalsky and Daniele Fabbri!

The next location with Paul was Mühlauer-Klamm. We approached a very interesting structure built for avalanche defence on the way up the mountain. This got Paul excited, check out his aerobatics at 0:12 in the video.

For more of Paul’s flying madness, visit his Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Another location on the briefing was Praxmar, and Lüsental, one of the side valleys of the main Sellraintal. I’ve never been there before, but have often passed it on the way to Kühtai.

The Lüsental valley leads to the glacier with incredibly picturesque views!

As I ventured up there, I began to hike to see what else I could find and wow, the most wonderful waterfall that I had seen in the Innsbruck region. I set up the drone and flew straight towards it.

As I flew closer, I realised that it was absolutely huge and had a lot of power, I never even knew it was up here. I captured parts of it at 240 frames per second (0:49), lovely stuff!

This is another reason I love Innsbruck – there is so much to discover, not just in the city, but in the wild too. Enjoy your exploration!

All photos © Ashley Wiggins unless otherwise stated.

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