Aerial Cinematography in Los Angeles, California

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

Shooting aerials in LA means shooting a city audiences have seen ten thousand times. The Hollywood sign, the downtown skyline and the PCH are all exhausted as establishing shots, which puts the work on finding the angle or the move that has not been used — and on matching whatever your A camera is doing so the cut does not announce itself.

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 Los Angeles

Los Angeles is one of the hardest places in the country to fly legally. The basin sits under LAX Class B, and inside that footprint you are also threading Burbank, Van Nuys, Santa Monica, Long Beach and Hawthorne. Most of the city a production actually wants to shoot sits in controlled airspace with low or zero-foot LAANC ceilings, which means authorization is a planning problem, not a formality.

The Los Angeles production market

This is the deepest crew market in the world and the one with the least patience for a unit that slows the day down. Paramount, Warner Bros. Burbank, Universal, Sony Culver City and every major streamer run production here, and they all have a drone vendor already. The way in is being the crew that lands the shot without becoming the reason lunch moved.

We shoot the Hollywood sign, downtown, the coastline from Malibu to Palos Verdes, and the studio lots — and we travel. CineDrones works nationwide, so if your production is basing in Los Angeles and shooting somewhere else entirely, that is a normal week for us.

What a Los Angeles 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 Los Angeles — 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 Los Angeles 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.