Aerial Cinematography in Albuquerque, New Mexico

An aerial shot either tells the audience something the ground cannot, or it is a postcard the editor eventually cuts.

Productions come to New Mexico for the landscape, and the landscape is exactly what aerial work exists to capture. The mesas, the Sandias and the high desert give you scale that a ground unit physically cannot show, which is why aerial budgets here tend to be better defended than elsewhere.

We work with directors and DPs the way any other camera department does — in prep, on the shot list, and on set as part of the plan rather than a novelty parked to one side. That means matching the look of your A camera, hitting the same marks take after take, and knowing which moves read on screen and which just show off the aircraft.

Flying Albuquerque

The Sunport shares its field with Kirtland Air Force Base, which puts military traffic into the same Class C airspace as everything else and makes coordination less routine than the airport size suggests. Get outside the metro and the airspace opens dramatically, which is much of the appeal.

The Albuquerque production market

New Mexico's incentive program and the studio build-out around Albuquerque have made this a steady production base rather than a location-only market. The landscape is the reason productions come, and landscape is what aerial units are for.

We shoot the Sandias, the high desert, the studio campuses, and the mesas — and we travel. CineDrones works nationwide, so if your production is basing in Albuquerque and shooting somewhere else entirely, that is a normal week for us.

What a Albuquerque booking includes

Prep with the director and DP, on the shot list rather than beside it
Color pipeline matched to your A camera
Repeatable moves, take after take
Log or raw capture as your post workflow requires
On-set data wrangling and same-day handoff

Cinema payloads carrying the sensor your show is already shooting, so the aerial cuts against the ground unit without a fight.

Selected credits

Our aerial units have worked on Ozark, Jack Ryan, Bosch, Mayans M.C., SEAL Team, NCIS: New Orleans, Fear the Walking Dead, American Horror Story, Modern Family, 9-1-1, Goliath, The Resident, Raising Dion, Castle Rock, Doctor Sleep and Chef's Table, for Netflix, Amazon, Apple, HBO, Hulu, Showtime, Sony, CBS, AMC, MTV and Bravo. See the work →

Aerial Cinematography in Albuquerque — questions we get

Can your aerial footage match our A camera?

That is most of the job. We shoot to match your capture format and color pipeline so the aerial cuts in without a grade fight. If your show is on a specific body, tell us in prep and we will build around it.

What can a drone do in Albuquerque that a helicopter cannot?

Fly low, fly close, fly inside, and cost a fraction. A helicopter still wins on altitude, endurance and long lens work over open ground. Any vendor who tells you drones replaced helicopters entirely is selling you something.

Do you work as part of the camera department?

Yes, and it matters. An aerial unit parked to one side as a novelty produces novelty shots. One that sits inside the camera department produces coverage the editor can actually cut with.